I bristle a little bit at the characterization of "antivax, sovereign citizen, fear of radio frequencies, or extreme religion" as intellectual abuse.
But I seem to have the same opinion as you do about homeschooling. I am biased by a small sample size of people I know who have homeschooled. Too many of them did so because it was too hard to get their kids up, fed, dressed, and on the bus each morning. Or because one of the public school teachers voted for a particular politician. I have seen very few parents who I felt were competent to teach any subject at a high school level. I have seen a few homeschoolers who wisely depend on co-ops with subject experts. But mostly I have seen what I consider to be failures.
To be fair, the failures I have seen in homeschool are not particularly worse than the failures I have seen in public school. I can't say if the two realities would be different if they swapped. It's just that I have seen great successes in public school and not so much from homeschools.
My own children have been successful in public school. To achieve the same level of success in homeschool would have taken a personal effort from their parents that I am skeptical would have occurred. As it is, they got two bright, well-educated parents to help them understand what the public schools were teaching and to explain dissenting opinions about antivaxing, radio frequencies, extreme religion, etc. :-) In my experience, public school education with active, involved parents is better than active, involved parents alone. At least in the schools my children attended. I admit ignorance to all but a handful of pretty decent public schools. But it is awesome that my children can spend five hours a week learning propaganda about Jefferson and Marx and then I can spend another three hours over dinners to add in John Locke and our local city council. And I lack the structure of the curriculum the school provides. So we can critique and disagree and agree and reinforce and still move through a complete semester of topics because we aren't depending on me to provide the framework and the 95% of things we actually agree on. It's ok if we rabbit hole a bit because the professional teacher will change the subject tomorrow and keep things moving.
I'd like to be excited about homeschooling and other alternate-schooling, but unfortunately my anecdotal experience with people (acquaintances, sometimes co-workers) who were the outcome of homeschooling biases me. The theory is great: DIY things that you can do better than the "pros". I DIY almost all the maintenance on my house, so it makes sense that one could possibly teach better than public school teachers.
But then you look at the actual reasons people are homeschooling, and by and large, it's parents who are opposing some perceived "indoctrination": Fundamentalist Christians objecting to things like sex ed, biology, evolution. More and more now, it looks like it's not just being driven by religion but by political ideology. Our local "moms" group is full of people pulling their kids out to prevent them from "being indoctrinated by the liberals" and for anti-vax reasons. For every 1 parent homeschooling because they really can provide a better education at home, there are probably 100 parents who are totally unqualified, will leave huge gaps in their kids' education, and are only doing it for ideological reasons.
In theory, having a smart parent at home DIYing their kids' education sounds like a great idea, but in practice, it's all the wrong people doing it for all the wrong reasons.
I've seen public school parents spend their time with their kids on making sure their kids don't believe anything that could challenge their religious or political beliefs, and many public school parents who encourage their kids to focus on sports alone to the exclusion of anything and everything else. Again -- compared to what?
I was homeschooled K-7 and again in 12th. I know lots of homeschool kids whose parents insulated them from the world (including mine, though less so than many) due to religion or just eccentricity. Almost all of us are successful, however, and very few stayed locked in that bubble. A key piece of that is because we became self-directed learners.
Where I grew up in a liberal big city, the only home-schooled kids I met were super well-educated children of professionals, and were way ahead of both public and private school kids. I was a lot like you - always finished my homework before class was over, read all the materials and was bored in school most of the time. I was jealous of the home-schooled kids. My parents would say, "well but it's good to be around people your own age," but the home-schooled kids had plenty of friends. That gave me the idea that homeschooling was a better way.
That was before I met home-schooled kids from the rest of the country, where it had nothing to do with giving them a better education; it had a lot to do with limiting their education, and forcing them into a fundamentalist Christian or Mormon ideology. Those kids really didn't get out to socialize much, and they didn't get a good education, either.
I think parents have a right to homeschool their kids, and a government ban on that scares me. But I also think the parents need to meet or exceed the qualifications of the teachers who would otherwise be teaching, and [edit][strikethrough]the government[/strikethrough] *society* has some interest in preventing someone from having 48 children and forming a cult.
So like a lot of other stuff extremist wackos do, "this is why we can't have nice things." The goal is to walk a fine line in the center where government can stop crazy people from using freedoms to do crazy things, while still allowing sane people to have the rights and privileges they need as free individuals within the framework of society.
I have no qualms about actual homeschooling, but in the past few years partisanship has seen a lot of people in my area pulling students from public schools over mask mandates, science education, and "wokeism". As recently as Tuesday, some parents are suing my school district and homeschooling because a 14yo asked to be called by he/him pronouns [1]. And here in Michigan, there are no regulations on what a homeschooled student needs to learn - no testing, no curriculum, no justification required, you can just say "we're homeschooling" and until that child turns 18 they can be completely isolated from any perceived threats to your ideology.
Homeschooling can be awesome when done for the right reasons! Student-teacher ratios are awesome, the curriculum and schedule can be perfectly tailored to your child's needs, interests, and abilities, and as you mention it works far better for families that need to travel a lot and technology is making the downsides less significant all the time.
But it can be terrible when done for the wrong reasons. Increasingly, those wrong reasons are being used [2]:
> In the vast majority of states, there are currently no protections in place for children who are homeschooled. This is the case despite a 2014 study finding that 47% of children who experience child torture were removed from school to be homeschooled (and another 29% were never enrolled in school), and a 2018 Connecticut study found that 36% of children removed from school to be homeschooled were subject to past child welfare reports.
And those studies are even before the surge of people pulling students due to pandemic politics. These issues are the reason that the press is "attacking homeschoolers", not some conspiracy to get additional funding. The fact that the author does not mention this trend at all is concerning.
Home schooling is one of those topics where there seems to be a huge difference between theory and practice. The theory is great: You're the parent. You are motivated by educational outcome. You believe your children can get a better education than at public schools. You have the time, patience, and resources to do a better job at home. The outcome is better-educated kids who get to skip the (admittedly terrible) abuses of the public school system. For some homeschooled kids, the above is actually what happened. You'll find all their glowing reviews of home schooling in the comment section below.
In practice, at least in the USA, it's different. By and large (with exceptions, obviously), you are motivated by religious separatism. You are not worried about the quality of the education, but the content. You see the public school system as uninvited ideology and home schooling as a loophole you can use to avoid it. The outcome is worse-educated kids who skipped entire subjects and are not even remotely prepared for higher education.
My wife's "moms groups" are always pushing homeschooling, and the sales pitch is never the quality of education. It's always that you can avoid those nasty topics like sex ed and evolution and that you can use the Bible in all your classes. More recently, during and after COVID, the pitches also included avoiding "political indoctrination". I know multiple actual families who pulled their kids out of public school for religious and ideological reasons, but nobody who did so with a legitimate intention of providing a higher quality factual education. Obviously they exist and a few are posting here, but I'd be shocked if those were even 10% of cases.
I'll never forget this clip[1] interviewing a homeschool family, where the poor kid looks mortified that she doesn't know even basic 2nd grade math, with her mom smugly laughing about it. These products of home schooling are not posting their success stories on HN.
The issue is not whether the average homeschooler is better or worse. The issue is the difficulties involved in ensuring homeschooling does not fail children. I was hoping the parallel between that and my later points about unlicensed doctors practicing over the internet would be somewhat evident.
My post didn't actually say that the average homeschooling education is worse for children than a public school, but I do happen to believe that it is :) This is, however, not based on scientifically-gathered data, so I would welcome data to the contrary.
I was homeschooled, and I agree that it is great if the parents can make the effort. I think that homeschooling gets an undeserved bad reputation for the perceived "brainwashing" but if it is done right then that is not an issue at all. It does allow the individual learner to excel at what they are good at, though. Once I learned to read my education was very self-driven and I came out very well-rounded because I would read tons (probably literally) of books about anything that interested me; I notice a lot of people identify themselves as a "math person" or an "English person" and I was never like that. I also agree that having other home-schooled kids around is nice; socialization is one of the primary arguments for public schooling but if you have it while homeschooling you've hit the jackpot.
"It's almost like" suggests to to me the author thinks homeschooling is the obvious and best answer, perhaps that folks are afraid to admit.
My experience has been that homeschooling has been worse than public schooling, even where parents have been professional teachers.
No doubt it can be better for some and in some areas may be the only sane choice. Some stats even indicate better academic outcomes.
Yet I've personally seen it bring a lot of strife, unreasonable expectations, and pain into the home. And the outcomes I've seen don't inspire confidence. As a group, at least where I've lived, homeschooling parents: don't give the kids a choice, do it for their own selfish reasons, produce kids without enough socializing among peers, and often indoctrinate the kids with religious 'teachings' that undermine critical thinking skills.
> Home-schooled children have attended Ivy League schools and won national spelling bees. They have also been the victims of child abuse and severe neglect. Some are taught using the classics of ancient Greece, others with Nazi propaganda.
So ... just like kids in public school?
Somewhat orthogonal to the article: In my state a lot of people were forced to home-school during Covid, and a significant percentage of them continue to do so. They found the experience and outcomes a lot better than what they had been getting at the public school. I listened to their experiences on a local radio show, and was fairly disappointed with the home school curriculum - it was far more focused on alternative subjects not taught in schools, and quite a lot of the "usual" curriculum was omitted (very little math, for example, and if they did teach science, it was with a lot less rigor). It was almost 80-90% about "experiential learning" vs "book learning". I get the value of experiential learning and do agree public schools have too little of it, but I fear these kids are being cheated out of the possibility of getting into STEM - there's no way they can do anything in the hard sciences without some good foundations.
The other thing that always confounds me: Virtually every study out there shows that on average, by a certain age, home school kids outperform public school kids in most/all arenas (social, academic, etc). At worst they perform at the same level. The parents are very happy with the outcomes. I've known homeschooled kids that are easily 2 grades ahead of where they would be at a typical public school - and with no social shortcomings whatsoever, but they may be outliers as the parents were brilliant themselves.
So, both anecdotal and research shows it to be superior. Yet most adults I've met who were home schooled as a kid are unhappy with their parents' choice.[1] I suspect it is akin to how most people overvalue what they don't have, seeing only the benefits of what they've been deprived and not the downsides.
[1] Although as I write this, I realize I should account for the fact that many/most kids really hate their school experience - particularly high school. So perhaps the home schooled kids aren't any less satisfied with their education experience than typical public school kids.
If I can demonstrate that the results of my "crazy" homeschooling is commensurate with (or surpasses) those of public schools, then what difference does it make. Yes, public school teachers have skills. Do those skills apply directly to the homeschool setting? Is there a difference between attempting to teach the one or two or so offspring compared to a classroom of strangers? Are parents incapable of attaining the necessary skills through any means besides university?
If it were reasonable to achieve "doctor" level results of medical care without being a doctor, then I would agree with you. The evidence shows otherwise. If I were getting poor results with my kids, they'd be back in public school.
I was homeschooled for 1.5 years, and while there were aspects of it I really enjoyed, it is absolutely rife with religious fundamentalists. My biology book used the "how many monkeys would it take to write the Bible randomly" as an argument for intelligent design. My mother didn't vet the books well because she was getting help from a Christian friend of hers.
Unfortunately, looking from the outside in, the teachers care but the administrators do not. While I would still consider public school, I think supplementing and supervising their assignments is the minimum a parent can do. Homeschool just isn't feasible for many people, and there is a reason teachers specialize in topics past grade 5.
The point is not that homeschooling provides a lower quality education than public schools (though I would argue that, on average, it does) - the point is that homeschooling is being done by unqualified people using unverified, quickly-considered techniques, while public schooling is at least largely done by people who got teaching certifications and their methods get public scrutiny.
To me, the amount of criticism public schools receive is an indicator of their worthiness - people are able to inspect the education and intervene directly if they feel it is inadequate, and the government has the ability to provide useful oversight and assist in setting standards. I'm sure there are many cases where this centralization is to children's detriment, but at least it is a largely transparent system.
In comparison, the only real transparency provided into a homeschooled child's education is when they start college and have to find out whether they really learned enough essential skills and information to be able to compete in a real educational environment. If the answer is 'no', it's too late to do anything.
Objective measurements would be great, and so would more rigorous enforcement. Historically, homeschooling groups are against both.
The most damaging, repugnant and horrific lesson that school teaches you is to accept school as essential and vital for the education of a populace. You appear to have absorbed this lesson very well.
If you believe that the political biases, rote memorization, rigorous examination, strict discipline, regimentation and social control that comes with public schooling is superior to the intellectual freedom of homeschooling and alternative education, you are deluded.
People will be biased, but for open-minded families, it's an excellent bet.
Then you underestimate just how apt children are at learning and absorbing information if given their own pace and room to heighten their interests. It's better to be well versed in a few fields and know minutiae about others, rather than merely know minutiae about many fields.
Please read the works of John Holt, John Taylor Gatto and Ivan Illich for further information.
I think I have basically the same opinion. It's not so much that I believe homeschooling is amazing in-itself, but rather that the public education system has so clearly deteriorated that it seems borderline criminal to subject your kids to it.
The question for me, personally, is private school vs. homeschooling. If you can avoid many of the downsides of public education via choosing the right private school (and being able to afford it), I do wonder if that would be superior to most homeschooling setups.
Sure. I just don’t think this argument that any child who is homeschooled is going to grow up and be a complete idiot and never contribute to society is a good one, especially since all of the comments in this thread making that argument are using anecdotes as evidence. I recently found out the band director at my high school was fucking kids. Can I use that to argue against all public schools? Of course not, so others should not be able to say “well I knew a kid who was homeschooled by a religious weirdo so all homeschooling is bad.”
It’s just odd that so many people here seem to be so in favor of the “sit down and shut up” style of schooling. Isn’t it pretty widely agreed upon that US public schools suck? Don’t you think there are some parents who are homeschooling their children explicitly because they feel their public school would not prepare them to be good members of society?
Personal anecdote here: my homeschooling experience, with a curriculum that accelerated learning in certain areas, and had plenty of data showing that their students outperformed public school students, did not properly prepare me for college or the “real world.” This is ignoring the religious indoctrination that was behind the whole of it. Even though my wife is a teacher, we chose not to home school our children because of my experience with it.
While I recognize that homeschooling is done by some because of their religious beliefs, and yes, some of those beliefs are pretty unusual, I would like to remind you that homeschooling is actually not 100% a cover for the nutjobs out there. I was homeschooled, and I'm now graduated highschool at 16. Homeschooling is a great way to avoid the mess and poor education that is public school, and in my experience with other homeschoolers, there aren't as many nutjobs as you seem to think. I apologize if I missed the point of what you were saying, but I wished to present an alternative view of homeschooling.
I was homeschooled for all but 2nd and 3rd grade. I have mixed feelings about my experience of it (for me it worked out sort of OK for various lucky reasons) but no mixed feelings about the concept of it, and I now believe it should be illegal. It's possible, even common, to have a terrible social experience AND a terrible education in homeschooling.
Most of the reasoning for it was that public schools are evil and stupid and raise evil drone kids with evil drone values. This is a terrible perspective to inculcate into your children and it warped my view of everyone around me well into my twenties. Also the homeschooling community tends to self-select for a lot of the most narcissistic and BPD types of parents who actually do inflict major developmental and psychological damage and abuse on their children.
There was also a smattering of justifying it to the effect of "children learn better at home than they do in a classroom environment". This may be partly and technically true, but in practice it gets cancelled out by the fact that most parents are not actually able to educate children effectively past a 3rd grade level.
There are always exceptions. The broad exception, as usual, is when the family has plenty of money and the parents have LOTS of autonomy over their work schedules. The home-schooled children of doctors and lawyers that I knew had private tutors in some subjects and did all kinds of travel, participated in sports and robot building competitions, even worked for state legislators as part of their "high school".
Long story short, I am sending my children to Minneapolis public schools. As a parent, I hugely get the desire to keep your kids close and be their everything all the way through to adulthood. It was hard for us to watch our six year old get on the school bus and think about this first chapter of our lives together was in some sense ending. But I also know from experience and observation, the protectionist instinct to keep your kids that close for that long is really not healthy.
But I seem to have the same opinion as you do about homeschooling. I am biased by a small sample size of people I know who have homeschooled. Too many of them did so because it was too hard to get their kids up, fed, dressed, and on the bus each morning. Or because one of the public school teachers voted for a particular politician. I have seen very few parents who I felt were competent to teach any subject at a high school level. I have seen a few homeschoolers who wisely depend on co-ops with subject experts. But mostly I have seen what I consider to be failures.
To be fair, the failures I have seen in homeschool are not particularly worse than the failures I have seen in public school. I can't say if the two realities would be different if they swapped. It's just that I have seen great successes in public school and not so much from homeschools.
My own children have been successful in public school. To achieve the same level of success in homeschool would have taken a personal effort from their parents that I am skeptical would have occurred. As it is, they got two bright, well-educated parents to help them understand what the public schools were teaching and to explain dissenting opinions about antivaxing, radio frequencies, extreme religion, etc. :-) In my experience, public school education with active, involved parents is better than active, involved parents alone. At least in the schools my children attended. I admit ignorance to all but a handful of pretty decent public schools. But it is awesome that my children can spend five hours a week learning propaganda about Jefferson and Marx and then I can spend another three hours over dinners to add in John Locke and our local city council. And I lack the structure of the curriculum the school provides. So we can critique and disagree and agree and reinforce and still move through a complete semester of topics because we aren't depending on me to provide the framework and the 95% of things we actually agree on. It's ok if we rabbit hole a bit because the professional teacher will change the subject tomorrow and keep things moving.
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