This started as a comment in the megathread but got long so I decided to make it it’s own post. Obviously covid makes this different, but for general purposes, I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it till I die, please don’t homeschool your kids
I was homeschooled from early in elementary school until halfway through my sophomore year of high school. The reason I joined high school is because I was so depressed and lonely I wanted to die, and I knew my education had been neglected for years, so I begged my parents to put me in public school. Basically the only thing my parents kept up with was math and that’s only because they had me in online math classes.
And of the homeschooling parents I knew, mine were some of the best ones as far as actually educating their children go. Mild neglect with some basic math and science from atheist parents is worlds better than the psycho Christian “education” some people I knew got.
But even with all that the education was the smaller problem. Turns out math is the only thing that actually builds on itself over time in the American education system, everything else just restarts but slightly more complicated when you get to high school.
The bigger problem was how alone I was and how stunted it made my social skills, something I’m still dealing with now and I’m in fucking grad school. Kids and teenagers need to be around people their own age. I straight up did not learn how to function properly in social situations. I almost got the shit beat out of me in my first week in high school for calling a football player a dumbass. If adults said things to me that were mildly accusatory I’d cry, but also I had no concept of not saying shit so I’d call out adults for any minor system issue or other problem completely out of their control which most people just found annoying. I had so much trouble understanding fairly basic social interactions.
My younger brother was homeschooled from after kindergarten all the way until his senior year of high school, which he then dropped out of. He was more stunted both socially and educationally than I was, and started smoking weed nearly every day when he was around 15 to cope. It also definitely didn’t help that my whole family is chock full of mental illness. I think he did just start at community college though, which I’m super proud of.
So yeah. Rant over. Don’t home school your kids. It’s shitty.
Right, they'll probably reassess a bit if things ever die down in the states with covid (they won't for a while) but I completely agree with not being in school at the moment.
It's a good point about socializing with strangers, but they're very self aware about the stuff and talk about it regularly and try to push him into new things around new people as much as they can at the moment.
Like I saw him make new friends at a skate park with kids he had never seen before pretty easily. Seemed fine to me, but I think a lot of that is that his parents, like I said, are super aware of these issues and consider it as important as anything else.
Well that’s good, I hope they do well. Personally I still get nervous, I think the unplanned interactions of school are important, like the fact that you’re just around people that you have to function with while you get other shit done, not just deliberate social interactions. It’s like practice for living in society around other people.
But yeah right now bad, so I’m glad they seem to be doing the best they can and I hope it goes well.