Anecdotally, most current or former homeschooled kids I meet seem pretty socially awkward. I wonder if It’s because the miss-out on the opportunity to learn how to socialize properly as children. But maybe I’m being too critical, idk.
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“Think you can provide more resources and well thought out and efficiently applied curriculum than a centuries old and constantly corrected product of society that draws on every corner of society and hundreds of lifelong full-time employees whose entire lives revolve around hopefully improving society and giving the confident, respectful, and considerate qualities to children? That system isn’t perfect and is compromise and resource-short hell… Why not give it a REAL half-assing and short-change your kids EVEN WORSE!”
Homeschooling is rarely successful and deprives children of the chance to socialize and practice it. As well a lot of the people who do it use it as a method of indoctrination for religious reasons.
It’s hubris and/or abuse, and should be illegal barring exceptional circumstances.
Public schools should be well funded.
Private schools should also be illegal.
Unless you’re an expert on child development and education, then you’re not qualified.
Former homeschooled kid here. Everything I’m about to say is personal experience but I’ve known many other homeschooled people throughout my life.
With homeschooling you get out what you put in. If the parents take the time to really dial in to the child’s learning needs and set up adequate socialization through after school activities or meetups with other homeschoolers I truly believe it is one of if not the best option for raising a child.
That being said, most of the people choosing to homeschool are not doing it to give their kids the best. Many are narcissistic conservatives who deny modern science and homeschool not to teach the child but to indoctrinate. They don’t consider mental health important. They don’t consider friends important. They consider the kid learning the Bible and toughening up important. The parents are often social outcasts themselves because of their more strict beliefs.
Homeschooling is not a problem and doesn’t result in anything directly, it’s the people choosing to homeschool not being equipped to do it properly. In my experience the kind of parent who would choose homeschooling is likely to produce a social awkward kid even if they don’t homeschool.
TL:DR - Homeschooling good. Most everyone who chooses homeschooling bad. Hug your kids.
This… I remember one of our neighbors finally letting their homeschooled kid go to public school and play with us. We had to teach him how to run. I remember my young mind being baffled by this. He was incredibly naïve and overly trusting so he got bullied mercilessly and beat up at recess. His mother did him no favors by being really nasty with us when we went over to take him fishing, exploring, etc. We moved away and i wonder what happened to him… he was a gentle soul.
Aw that’s so rough on the poor guy, it likely did him a world of good moving forward that he had friends like you to open his eyes, even if it was a short time.
I had the reverse happen where I was teaching the public school kids that you could climb trees. I’m sure it wasn’t mindblowing for them, but they had just never thought about it before. We were like 13 at the time.
I had a wonderful experience too, my parents really put their heart and soul into me and my siblings and we had a local homeschooling group larger than one of the nearby schools that did minimum weekly outings and the like.
I’m an electrical engineer now, my sisters are lawyers, bankers, and concert pianists, my brothers are studying for medical doctorate and running a forge, and many of my friends are in similar places.
Just to add my voice to yours, it’s absolutely all about what you put into it. I have deep lifelong friendships from my homeschooling days, the heavy intent our parents had on the social aspect was imperative. I joined after school activities by the local high-schools later on and met some great public school friends.
The natural flow of learning time-wise vs the rigidity of public school is a studied and proven to be far more conducive to education, as well, and I wish public schools would learn this.
Mine and my siblings’ and friends’ experience was amazing compared to most if not all of my public school friends, and it was all thanks to our parents pouring their lives into giving us all of the knowledge and environments we needed. It can definitely not go this way, if the parent isn’t actively providing those environments, but it is and always will be an issue of the tool being used incorrectly.
Just need to correct one small thing.
I had a wonderful experience too
My experience was absolutely terrible and I would have been better off in a public school. My parents were proof of why homeschooling is the wrong choice 99% of the time
I was homeschooled by such parents as you describe, and I still have social difficulties in my 30’s because of it. I also wasn’t hugged at all, but I don’t think that alone would have fixed it 😛
Yeah the ones I know only see Facebook news (pushed by Russian bots and right wing propoganda) about how public schools are evil and bad and you should definitely send your child to private religious school (who definitely won’t rape them) or home school them to install horrible values to ensure they grow up to vote regressive .
Its bad man.
I have friends in the old country who do homeschooling. They’re the kind who do it for good reasons. The amount of controls, checks and justifications the parents have to go through constantly is huge. Constantly prove the teaching methods, program, environment, everything. So there are ways to permit homeschooling that seem better it seems.
If there is one thing going to highschool in Texas taught me it’s that Germany was communist during WW2.
Well, also that it may be good if you have time to NOT neglect the child and can get mentors/tutors to help them.
But even then they have to go to school at some point to learn socializing, no?
The absolute back-breaker of the US educational system. They keep kids out of school to indoctrinate them by completly incompetent people instead of giving them a proper, universal education and the ability to come in regular contact with kids of their age outside the normal circles.
That does not mean that the US school system is the ultimate solution, on the contrary. But it would be much more important to fix that than to allow any yokel to brainwash their kids at home into a next generation undereducated and narrowminded person.
This is funny to me because I was homeschooled specifically so I wouldn’t become an uneducated yokel lmao
The majority that defend homeschooling do so on pure ideological grounds. They accuse schools of indoctrinating kids, but they want to personally ensure their kids are indoctrinated the way they (the parents) deem correct. “Sex is evil! Women should submit to men! <Ethnicity> is pure evil! Never question me!” - these parents should NEVER homeschool their kids.
There are very few situations where homeschooling would be better for the kid over traditional schooling, and those situations are usually remedied with the school getting its shit together and being at least decent.
The school can’t always get better though and can even be harmful to kids, due to bad teachers, bad staff, bad classmates or general precarious conditions, especially if the kid has any sort of special need (autism, down’s syndrome, etc). Changing schools isn’t always an option, whether due to distance or cost of moving back and forth every day, and that’s usually when homeschooling should be done.
I was homeschooled for pretty much the exact opposite ideological reasons, and am so grateful to have had the chance to explore and develop without institutional constraints. Some great years traveling in a bus and seeing how a wide variety of people lived. To me homeschooling is an ideal of time commitment to a child that most people are unable to achieve, and offloading that opportunity to a centralized authority while you pursue a paycheck is a tragic compromise
School is more than just what you learn. It’s crucial for development to socialize with children your age, and close to your age. There’s a reason the stereotype that homeschoolers are socially awkward exists
There’s plenty of opportunity to socialize as a homeschooler. The stereotype exists because many (most?) homeschooled kids are so because the isolation and rejection of social norms is the point. But there’s also a demographic of them that exist because they live in bad school districts and don’t have the money for private school.
Neighborhood kids form bonds with other neighborhood kids regardless of the school they go to. Homeschool kids are more often than not allowed to join their local school sports teams as well. I think you’d be surprised how many people you’ve met who were homeschooled that you’d never guess.
…when someone seems normal you aren’t looking to explain their differences. The chance to socialize in the real world as opposed to a classroom environment is one of the things I value most about that period. We clearly have very different perspectives, in my community yours might be socially awkward. And that’s ok, it is in no way “crucial” for you to think feel or act the way I do :)
I went to school where I live and it was abysmal. My oldest 2 I homeschooled for a few years, eventually found a good school they could go to. Those 2 had a much better attitude towards school than the later ones who had to go from pre-K, (they felt more in control of their own education) and similar academic achievement in the end.
I sure as heck could not have homeschooled them through high school. And they did plenty of things with other kids, and more with mixed age groups than school kids do.
It’s possible the kids you met who were awkward were homeschooled because they were so socially awkward and not the other way around. Mine can socialize circles around me, and I’d say the 2 who started later are more socially adept.
ETA 2 things. Homeschooling is well supported by the school district, kids get tested every year. And no we are not religious.
I lived in an area with bad schools for about 4 years. I spent time in public school and a number of church schools. Religion fucked me up pretty good, but at least my parents weren’t crazy religious nuts, so I at least got to come home to some normalcy. I didn’t meet a lot of home school kids until way later. I have met several that are brilliantly well adjusted human beings, who were non-religious homeschoolers who were doing it for other reasons. I’ve met other people who think water boils because god wills it and sickness is caused by demons latching onto your unconfessed sins.
I’m generally against it in most circumstances, but I do think it depends largely on the intention of the parents. If we had better public schools, I think the amount of homeschoolers would naturally drop quite a bit.
I was “homeschooled”, along with my many siblings, by Southern Baptist parents. I couldn’t really read until I was 9, and my younger siblings until even later. My older siblings had it marginally better, but not by much.
I was horrendously under-socialiazed, and I still struggle with debilitating social anxiety to this day. Although I should emphasize that a couple of my siblings are very socially competent and relatively well-adjusted, so I’m not sure how much of my issues in that domain are nature vs. nurture.
It always made me feel awful and dumb to hear peers at church talking about school-related things and what subjects they were learning, because I had no idea what they were talking about, which exacerbated my social difficulties. In my teenage years I started to understand what was happening, and I practically had to beg my mother for any kind of instructional material. I taught myself algebra with the help of internet friends. I still distinctly recall how utterly unscientific and creationist-bent was a biology textbook I got; it was so bad that even I was questioning it at the time.
My younger siblings were eventually allowed to participate in a homeschooling “coop” after my younger brother begged for something. Homeschool coops involve homeschool families getting together to have some semi-structured classes, usually something like once a week. Said brother took a “psychology” class there, the textbook for which was written by a guy with a business or economics degree and no background in psychology, and it said mental illness was the result of sin.
Home schooling in my state is ridiculously under-regulated. All you have to do is be registered with a private school as homeschooling and submit transcripts that comply with the state education requirements. That’s literally it. My mother fabricated them - the records say I took Spanish in high school, but I couldn’t have told you much beyond “hola”.
I went to college with what was essentially a fake high school diploma. I languished in my 20’s. I got a master’s degree in my 30’s, but I was lucky and happened to be gifted when it came to academia; most homeschool kids aren’t so fortunate. Most of my siblings have not managed to actualize their potential. I myself could have been doing much more much earlier if I hadn’t gotten a woman pregnant during college because I’d never had anyone tell me to use a condom. In retrospect, my parents’ duress at learning that I was having a child out of wedlock is almost comical for having been essentially self-induced.
I don’t know if homeschooling should be banned outright (as I’m aware of select cases where some parents weren’t neglectful and it was actually a better option for some kids due to various circumstances), but something needs to change. At a minimum, I think homeschoolers should be required to do the same state standardized testing as required in public schools in order to ensure they’re not being outright neglected like I and my siblings were.
My child is attending public school, which has had it’s own set of issues (bullying and a shocking amount of violence, for starters), but it’s a marvel to me the gap between what she knows and what I knew at her age. She’s learning things that I still haven’t. She’s better off for it.
Tl;Dr: don’t homeschool, do improve public school.
I saw this question asked before and my answer is still the same. I have never met a homeschooled person who wasn’t a fucking idiot. Do with that what you will.
Working engineer with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree 👋. I credit an older sister who got into the world first who gave warning to us younger ones and the good sense to listen to her advice. I can clock a homeschooler a mile out but the well educated, well socialized ones have put in a lot of effort to get there and I won’t out them if they don’t want to be. The well-adjusted ones don’t talk about it much, same as a public school educated person wouldn’t bring up their grade school experience frequently.
You’ve met many people who introduced themselves as homeschooled who were what you describe. You’ve interacted with many more who did not make their school history their whole personality.
I didn’t mean to say all homeschooled people are stupid. Only the ones I met.
Big part of school is training on how to be socialized into society. Interact with people who are different than you. Homeschooling provides none of that.
It took me years to overcome getting homeschooled for my first two years of high school. Learning how to socialize and deal with other people is an essential skill for the rest of your life and arguably more important than anything else they teach you - you can catch up on academics relatively quickly but nothing can replace daily interactions with your peers over multiple years. Everything important requires at least a little social skill - jobs, relationships, friends, peer networks
Depends on the where and why.
In the Netherlands because you think it’s inadequate? No, the public education system there is exceptional, this is objectively the wrong position.
In the Deep South in the US because you feel the education system is inadequate, racist, corrupted by christofascism, and designed for failure? Based, there are plenty of good homeschool co-ops for parents with the same gripes.
In the Deep South because you think it isn’t loony enough and you want your kid to be a raging lunatic like you? Go fuck yourself. Seriously. Stop having children.
You. You’re funny, and accurate. I like you.
