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.
As an European it's always absolutely boggled my mind that shit like that can even be legal. Where are the government agencies to save these poor kids from their crank parents?
Where are the government agencies to save these poor kids from their crank parents?
Big Gubbernmint Communism? In MY god fearing America?!?
cw
you sound like you just had bad parents.
yeah i literally got groped all the fucking time by 20+ people in highschool. in fact, i literally do not trust anyone ever because of this (including my boyfriend, even though hes awesome). so many people sexually assaulted me that all their faces blurred together and everyone i see walking down the street frightens me. i had a surgical wound and people would try to mess with it. im not gonna send my kids to go get sexually assaulted and filled with capitalist indoctrination. my bf and i are both highly qualified to educate children and even got certs for it for this purpose. none of the school admin helped.
not to disparage your loneliness, but thats all i ever wanted in highschool. to be left alone.
My kids are homeschooled. We took them out of school when they were repeatedly bullied, and school administrators did nothing about it. Small-town old boys club shit. There's no such thing as school choice, private schools, or any other options where we live. It's the local school or nothing. If my kids don't feel safe in the local school, then goddamnit, I'm not gonna force them to go.
I do feel you on the social side of it, and that's the part that we struggle the most with, especially with covid, it's hard to find social time outside of the family, but outside of covid, that was at least possible, and something we took very seriously. Homeschooling is not for everyone, and there are definite downsides, so I'm not an advocate of it, but I think we're making it work for our kids.
I was homeschooled by southern baptists who eventually turned into self proclaimed "reformed" baptists/ Calvinists. Neither parents were college educated, and i was constantly reminded that my gender required a male guardian even in adulthood, and that my godly purpose was to obey and procreate. i still have social anxiety, intimacy issues, and im terribly insecure about my education, especially math. I dont talk to my family at all anymore either. They would hate what ive become ( a communist with no children or husband!)
I've never met you, but I love that you've become. Congratulations on getting out of that environment. It's not easy on the best days.
I think the only case it works is if like theres a community of parents cooperating and basically starting their own neighborhood school. But yeah otherwise that sounds pretty bad
And usually when that happens they’re insane religious people
Homeschool pods are cropping up in my state and they're almost 100% fueled by resentment over masks and CRT hysteria
I’m in fucking grad school.
Well, that tends to lower the bar at least. But for real, you're 100% right. I made my original r*ddit account to shit on homeschooling. My elementary school best friend got homeschooled for religious reasons (homophobia) for middle and high school. He didn't learn shit, now he's a :the-pigs: :sadness-abysmal:.
Yeah I was worried that’d slightly hurt the point I was trying to make lol. But I only got to this point through a lot of luck, sliding in on the barest minimum qualifications, and a lot of work to dig myself out of the hole my parents put me in, and I have the worst imposter syndrome of anyone I know
And I’m sorry about your friend, that blows. I feel bad for the guy.
And I’m sorry about your friend, that blows. I feel bad for the guy.
It's unfortunate. He wasn't doomed to be a pig, it was just a natural outcome of what was normalized and encouraged in his deeply nationalistic household.
Oh god the hounding parents are so bad, and again compared to my friends I had it good. They set sky high expectations for me education wise but basically just said “Idk figure it out 🤷♂️“ which is not helpful
If you're considering homeschooling your child because you don't trust the American education system to give your child a decent education, the answer is not to do it yourself, it's to move to a country that has a competent education system: a nearly impossible task for most. It sucks, but the reality is that you won't do a better job and your kid will have a lot of difficulty as a result.
Alternatively, you can put the kid through regular school and additionally cover material that is more advanced and helpful outside of school. This I think is the best method. As an educator myself, I don't think I could handle the full time job of comprehensively educating a child on everything all by myself, but I think it would be fully within my ability to augment and improve my child's education. I understand the desire to prevent bullying or other social issues with other students, but what needs to happen is moving to another school, something for which provisions are in place in the existing system, though they often suck. Not having enough social interaction at all is going to result in a lot more difficulty down the line.
Yeah that's a good point - I'm a teacher and a good one, but the idea of teaching a kid everything sounds like a totally fucked up task I would for sure do that poorly.
Yeah, like I can do the curricula for pretty much all of science, andall of social studies and that kid will know more about chemistry, physics, history, politics, geography, sociology, and anthropology than any other kid graduating from high school, but math? Math? Oh I'm gonna fuck that up. That's gonna be a kid who can remember every equation for everything and tell you the political history in every nation but who also has to use a calculator to figure out how to do a 20% tip on an exactly $50 meal
How is that kid going to know physics if you can't do math lol
But yeah, I like to think I'm pretty worldly and know a lot of shit but there's something to be said for expertise you know? Like aside from language or auto mechanics shit I know I know nothing about, even though I'm well-read and can write very well, I'm sure there are incredible subtleties to teaching that to someone else I'd really rather have an expert teach my kids to write you know?
No, yeah, I can understand equations and how to use them, but I can't do basic math for shit lmao. The genuine inverse of the "you're not gonna have a calculator on you all the time." Yes, actually, I never go anywhere without a magical combination calculator/flashlight/camera/recorder/encyclopedia called a smartphone. Why should I memorize a bunch of multiplication and division tables?
But yeah, that's what I mean. Nobody can remember everything about everything, that's why we build education systems as a society, so that people who are good at certain things can teach that thing to everyone adequately, and compensate for difficulties in learning.
I get you on the math. Complex math like calculus and physics is a completely different skill from arithmetic, and you can absolutely be good at one and suck at the other
I know of this fascist "intellectual" who runs this online book club focusing on Western Classics and I've always wondered what the hell someone who gets homeschooled by someone like that even fucking turns out like.
Like, no matter how fucking well read and erudite you are I don't know if some landlord data scientist guy obsessed with Evola is going to be able to teach their kid PreCalculus well enough to like, get a job or something lmao
Also how sick in the head do you have to be to think public schools indoctrinate you into "removed" culture and Marxism
I went to public school in the same ISD for all 12 grades and I'm still alone and socially stunted. No close friends and never been in a relationship. I'm probably autistic though.
We homeschooled our kids last year because of covid. We were going to send them back to public school this year until delta hit. We can't send them back now because it clearly isn't safe. As soon as they can get vaccinated and it's safe, we're sending them back. If it never becomes safe, we're going to move to a different country.
My kids had been in public school in two different countries for years before then and did well socializing with their peers. They still hang out with kids in the neighborhood every day, sometimes like voraciously for hours, and they also watch TV and play video games.
We use Khan Academy to keep them up to speed with their grade when it comes to math. We're reading and discussing A People's History of the United States and also watching Bald and Bankrupt for social studies. (I know the guy is problematic but the fact that he just walks around random countries talking with random people goes a long way to contradicting the bloodthirstiness of the corporate media IMO.) We write and read whatever the hell we want for English and listened to the Infinite Monkey Cage today for science.
I've worked in education for years and also subbed at the local elementary school. Homeschooling when it's done right is almost like just hiring an expensive tutor who actually gives a shit about your kids. The teachers at the local school aren't bad but there's only so much you can do when you're with twenty kids in a classroom. The socialization aspect is undoubtedly the most important part of public school but of course that's also a double-edged sword. I've personally observed that "kids these days" are generally (not always) less cruel to one another than they were when I was in school.
That being said, your experiences are valid and I'm sorry for what you went through. I think it's good to keep this shit in mind and to remember the consequences of spending years being isolated from your peers.
watching Bald and Bankrupt for social studies
oh my god that guy is absolutely fucking disgusting
I can speak Spanish fluently and thought the way people in his LatAm videos reacted to him made me uneasy (sex tourism is very common in Mexico) since they occasionally gave each other that particular look that says "dude this guy is fucking weird". This was way before I knew how insanely awful he is. His friends are even worse...
Good on you for showing them other countries but man that guy is GROSS
Yeah he definitely manages to act creepy around women in almost every episode.
Friend of mine is homeschooling their kid, but I agree with it. They do a good job he's very smart, and for socialization he has friends in his neighborhood he hangs out with all the time. Plus his whole family is close and all the kids are around the same age.
Not getting traumatized by shithead teachers in schools seems good to me. I'd say going to a public school to get bullied by staff and kids alike fucked me up more than anything else lol.
Like, not wanting kids in public schools, especially right now, is completely reasonable.
I don’t want to say that homeschooling your kids is never the right thing to do, but it’s very very hard to do right and a lot of times even the “good ones” are still missing major things.
Like, my parents claimed I was well socialized because I did have friends I would hang out with fairly often. But there’s a big big difference between hanging out with your handful of friends a few times a week and being in school with hundreds of other kids some who you know some who you don’t. That interaction with people you don’t know or only kind of know is really important, especially at the age where everyone’s figuring it out at the same time. Everyone’s good at socializing with their friends, socializing with relative strangers is a lot harder.
But also yes right now is a very big exception, schools shouldn’t even be open right now except as free day care for absolutely essential workers while everyone else stays the fuck home.
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.
i feel like its better to say don't homeschool IF you can't provide a constant social outlet outside of schooling. Like if a kid goes to clubs/the mall/skatepark etc... and has a social outlet separate from school I think that's more healthy than having education and socialization tied together
like an ideal would be having education and socialization separate from one another right?
I disagree. Part of the benefit of school is that it isn’t a designated place for socializing, you have to interact with people you don’t know or hardly know while getting other unrelated shit done. Socializing with people you know deliberately is very different from people you don’t know or just met out of necessity.
Plus the time difference is insane. Even if you’re doing shit every evening that’s still what, 3-4 hours a day? Compared to 7 for school, plus any after school activities, plus socializing outside of school. Just passively being around other kids for that long is a huge deal.
well ideally school wouldn't be that long, like my idea system, would be like 3 hours schooling, then 3/4 hours doing social activities like clubs and stuff (still "school"), then the rest is free time.
School is only that long because it is government daycare, not because education necessitates that length. Plus I don't feel like school is actually that good for socializing since in reality, you find 3/4 people you like and stick with them throughout the school day lol.
you find 3/4 people you like and stick with them throughout the school day
I mean yeah people have friends, but you still have to passively interact with others. There’s something to be said for simply having to exist in the same space as others for an extended period of time.
I agree about the length of school though, especially for younger kids, but I still think that time should be spent in a place with other kids their same age, like you said. Not so much “shorter school days” more “reallocating time spent during the school day.”
Yeah I'm a teacher but before I worked in a class I used to work with homeschooled kids and have a pretty good understanding of the lay of the land. (For context I worked in a lib/hippy area not a don't-tread-on-me area, to give you an idea of the parents.)
I concur. 100%. Many of the kids, most, were pretty socially maladjusted. Just like way behind for their age group. And there is nothing wrong with being weird, but it did seem like a source of frustration for a lot of them. There were a few kids who were negligently behind in academics (and like basic shit like a 14 year old kid who didn't know the months of the year or how to tell time) but these were the exception, most of them were pretty fine academically, average spread.
A few notes: there are confounding factors here. Students who are socially behind are more likely to have trouble in school and be removed, so my experience may be a chicken and egg thing.
The kids I worked with who were normal mostly had something very social that kept them from attending high school full-time. Professional actors, professional-track athletes, etc. They had a vibrant social circle of friends in those domains. So if you really want to home school your kids make sure you put a heavy emphasis on finding genuine, regular and independent social development.
My home-schooled middle school experience was weird; it was my slightly less crazy Lutheran mother trying to fix the fuck-ups of the completely fucking unhinged paedo Lutheran grade school I initially went to, in order to prepare me for public high-school.
Didn't help too much and I ended up graduating HS as a C- average stoner, but I feel like having gotten a taste of all the different types of schooling available here (including public, private, and community college) prepared me for a succesful career in anti-american-education-system crankery.
