Then you’ve heard wrong.

It’s banned in a lot of European countries AFAIK.

Should be banned in every country with decent public education. Unless you have a formal education background you have no business formally educating anyone. Everyone has stories of things their parents taught them that turned out to be total bullshit and they only found out because they went to actual school.

i feel homeschooling marked me for life as an unsociable person.

every homeschooled person i know has expressed similar dismay.

i wish my parents public schooled me and put the efforts they put into homeschooling into giving me a decent home life, rather than being exhausted all the time.

i was decent at math and that was my saving grace. my siblings are dumb as rocks. we were considered smart at our homeschool co-op. one person i knew couldn’t go to community college because they couldn’t pass remedial classes.

a lot of my classes were useless nonsense - i wasted a lot of time on religious history and Latin.

a stable homelife with a solid education on avoidable pitfalls, life planning, assistance finding out what passions to chase and how to get there, and putting money towards college rather than homeschooling would far outweigh any benefits, if any, that homeschooling offers.

if “peer pressure to do drugs” is such a concern for a middle schooler, i can guarantee you that its going to be worse for a homeschooled kid becoming an adult and escaping helicopter parenting.

Most homeschool teachers have no business raising kids, let alone teaching them.

I’d have had an unarguably better life if I’d gotten into drugs with my friends in middle school. Which is to illustrate that I’m an outlier. Homeschooling sets your children up for failure. Most homeschooling programs out there are flat out bad. If you decide to do it, contact your local school district for reliable curriculum. They (professional educators) can point you in the right direction far better than the internet.

I’m surprised by the amount of unfounded and uninformed opinions, whether for or against, that have a lot of upvotes. Then there are people who have been homeschooled, homeschool their kids, or work with homeschooled kids and commented to share information. Those have far less upvotes. Wtf. Listen to other people’s experiences.

I have two homeschooled nieces. Their biggest strength is that they “like to dance”. Honesty, these girls are screwed and the world is going to grind then up as soon as they have to survive on their own.

Let your kids learn from professionals. This is like you expecting to be able to be a good accountant with no training.

Let your kids learn about social pressure and stress with easy it’s problems, don’t let their first experiences be as an adult with no coping skills.

Parents overestimate their ability to be a good teacher.

I’ll just leave you with this.

We were homeschooled.

Not the “religious nut” kind of homeschooling though. I wasn’t even aware that was a thing growing up. Our parents actually raised us totally atheist, so almost the opposite!

Personally I’m glad we were homeschooled, our parents actually did teach us well and we learned all the academic stuff you’d expect us to learn. (The state we grew up in also has a system of “you take yearly state-run standardized tests to make sure you’re actually being taught stuff”, which probably helps. But like, I don’t think that was the only reason our parents taught us well, I’m pretty sure they actually cared, too.)

The downside of all that is that it helped our parents keep us isolated. But honestly, I’ll take that over the bullying (and indoctrination) we’ve heard of public school having. Public school sounds like hell.

– Frost

Homeschooling is a great way to completely fuck up your kids. My wife and I both have Masters degree so we consider ourselves well educated, but we have always recognized that we do not have the depth and width of knowledge that our kid needed to exposed to. Also we always recognized that teaching requires dedication and skill sets we do not have.

I am not even going to comment on the lack of socialization the kid will miss out on.

The only reasons any parent home schools a kid is because the parents are wack jobs or terrified.

I’m talking from a US perspective, but I work in an education adjacent field that reviews a lot of homeschool student’s academic records from across the country. IMO, there are two types of homeschoolers. There’s the students who are truly brilliant living in a part of the country that doesn’t value education, and they’re practically forced into homeschooling (or a popular online program like Stanford Online High School) in order to receive an actual education that could challenge them. They do get less socialization than their traditional schooled peers, but they’d get mercilessly bullied at a traditional school so it’s hard to say how much value that socialization has.

The other type are the religious fundies. I have even more hands-on experience with this style, as some of my cousins were homeschooled in this manner. IMO, this shit should be illegal. It’s accepted because someone is typically monitoring these students’ academic progress, but I can say with confidence that Republican states are letting a lot of shit slide. It’s religious indoctrination at a level beyond what you would even find at a religious private school. Typically, these students are better socialized than the other homeschool students, though with the caveat that all their socialization happens in religious settings.

Parents may hate the idea of the public school system because everything is government-approved and streamlined. However, it isn’t like those same parents have a better idea in how to educate their children on their own, on top of everything else they have to do as a parent.

Also, 9 times out of 10, homeschooling involves lots and lots of religious brainwashing.

It should be illegal or heavily restricted, as it is in many countries already.

1. The kid doesn’t get what’s easily the most important aspect of school (even more important than the curriculum), socialization.
2. The kid gets an education from someone who likely has no qualifications whatsoever, and is more than likely homeschooling for fundamentalist religious reasons.

Nope, no…

Don’t do it.

Kids will say thank you.

You should only do it if absolutely necessary (no nearby schools, mental reasons, etc.) otherwise, if a kid can handle being in a school building, they should go. Staying homeschooled, especially starting at a young age, can cause major developmental issues and anti-socialness.

First off, not all homeschooling is equal. On the one hand you have completely isolated, unstructured tutoring without any oversight by the local education board, and on the other you have organized remote learning and hybrid programs where the kids have a set curriculum and do their work online.

My daughter does the latter. She meets her homeroom teacher online with a bunch of other kids every day, and they meet up for group events and field trips once a month or so. She also meets up once a week with a local homeschooling group where they spend the morning studying then play together in the afternoon. She’s an outgoing, enthusiastic kid who loves making new friends despite the fact that she does get less social interaction with other kids than if she went to regular public school.

The reason we decided to homeschool is because we were traveling a lot when she was very young and we got used to the flexibility of not being tied down to vacations during regular school holidays. It has allowed us to take her on trips that she wouldn’t have been able to had she been stuck to the normal public school schedule.

That said, it’s not for everyone. Homeschooling properly is a full time job and you need to be very diligent and patient. However, I’ve seen it work first-hand, so don’t let people with no actual experience of homeschooling tell you that every homeschool kid is going to turn out a socially awkward pariah. Check out the options available where you live and see if it might be a good fit for your family situation.