I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.

Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.

Modern academic life is only well suited to a small percent of the population. Those children who are truly happy and excelling in that setting.

So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? Forced mass education was a good idea for developing societies, but personalized education has been possible for at least a decade now, at a fraction of the cost. And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.

Here's a famous song on the topic for those who know how to "chew the meat from the cud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...

* It's fascinating to watch the points on my comment go up and down a ton. Very controversial issue. I believe it highlights pressure from social and political structures in society, and/or personal experiences. They vary so much.

We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.

We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.

But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.

That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.

Home schooling has answers for ALL of that.

If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.

A few things I'll note:

  - educational spending has almost zero correlation with outcomes
  - the number one indicator of educational success is parental involvement
  - homeschooling and charter schools tend to attract the outliers from both ends.  The smart who are underserved where they are and the kids with problems whose parents are involved enough to search for solutions.
  - the real losers are those whose parents can't or won't get involved and who aren't succeeding on their own

In reality, stories of homeschooling failure are probably no more common than stories of failure in public high school, they're simply more attention-grabbing.

- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.

- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.

It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.

So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?

So for everyone saying that homeschooled kids aren't well adjusted or have bad social skills, I'll offer the counterpoint that they might appear unadjusted at first, but humans can usually adapt to new environments, so homeschooled kids have a pretty good chance at acting "normal" a short time after leaving homeschool. Don't judge someone's awkwardness the first time you meet them, let them adjust a bit and see if they can assimilate.

There is really nothing intrinsically good about the average public school. Many are filled with kids that aren't there to learn. From the attitudes seen in this forum, that seems to be OK, because school is paradoxically about "socializing", while most here report being bullied.

As noticed here many home schoolers have religious reasons for their choice. The reason is simple, "Don't send your children to Ceasar and then be upset when they come home as Romans".

But as a general principle, encouraging kids further and further out of (group) human contact seems like an obviously terrible idea to me. We're already doing it with (lack of) play spaces, "no ball games", insane screen times (which equates to less "real" face to face time) amongst teens, awkward kids who can't even engage with a stranger under any circumstances - and meanwhile isolation and loneliness is on the increase, fear continues to rise about even letting your kid walk down the street to the shops, etc...

School is hard, as are parts of life. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, it's not always what you want it to be, you get shouted at sometimes and big kids get their way and you don't get asked on the football team. Honestly, and sorry, but - a big part of growing up is learning how to deal with things. If kids don't, and you as a parent don't help them deal with the bumps, you and they will be building unrealistic expectations about how good this life is going to be, and they'll spend all their time sad or "triggered" or afraid, or isolated, or unable to join in. They'll get more scared, more isolated, more depressed. This is not what any parent wants.

This - of course and x1000 - need to be done with massive quantities of love and compassion. This isn't some Victorian hellscape I'm advocating here. Real bullying is real. Sometimes adults need to weigh in. Kids will find school hard.

But loving your kids is NOT giving them everything they want. It's teaching them how to navigate things that are difficult and awkward and - ultimately - helping them become robust adults.

Happy to share more anecdotes if people have questions.

You also have to spend an insane amount of time with the lowest performers, because with enough attention, they can improve dramatically.

But this creates tradeoffs. Should I neglect the students doing best?

One on one instruction is the best kind. It’s generally reserved for doctoral students.

I also tried homeschooling by eldest. It didn’t work.

Its insane more parents don’t homeschool.

American classrooms now come with risk of being shot, pervasive drug influence, cyber-bullying, etc.

Like why would I subject my kid to all these arbitrary hurdles

I believe that for kids have parents willing to provide it, home education (especially when tailored to the child) is always going to outperform other forms of education. There are trade-offs, and those trade-offs have become easier to deal with in the last 10 years even. Our kids each get the amount of socialization that works for them, have volunteer opportunities and community groups, etc.

The main reason it works, though, is that my wife is willing and our finances support her to do it full-time. I know there are plenty of families where both spouses can work while homeschooling, but for our particular needs that would never work out.

But I am a math person, and we are homeschooling our 2 boys. My 12-year-old is able to understand mathematical concept and scientific topics that many high schoolers are never even exposed to. My wife does a great job with many other subjects as well. And we have many great homeschooling parents who group together to teach things they are specialized in (like construction, art, etc). Our homeschool group also has a lot of social time for the kids to just play together (mostly outside). It's awesome.

I think the quality of the education depends on the teachers. And a big part of being a good teacher is caring. Hopefully the parents will care more about their kids than any other teacher would. Additionally, we are in the golden age of homeschooling resources (mostly online).

Be very careful what your outsource to others.

An example:

- The numbers on reported satisfaction are taken at face value. But they are influenced by some biases.

-- Survivors Bias contributes to the satisfaction rates of homeschooling; It's hard to get into homeschooling but easy to get out of. As a result, those satisfied keep doing it while those dissatisfied with the public system are less likely to change.

etc etc

Also a fun side effect, they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud. One of them was self-aware enough to ask us to correct him.

Something to keep in mind: "Homeschool" is a useless descriptor. It covers a spectrum from complete educational neglect to world class private tutoring. It includes cohorts almost indistinguishable from school, and cohorts that engage in cultish indoctrination.

Any criticism you might have for your idea of homeschool, there exists a type of homeschooling that addresses that criticism, and there will be someone in the replies ready to tell you about it.

Also its given me the chance to learn things that I missed during my primary and secondary educations. Going through each proof in Euclid's Elements again has been a lot of fun, and its been long enough that I have forgotten most of them, so the thrill of discovery is real for me too.

If you can make it work, you should make it work, even if that means moving to a lower CoL area, there are a lot of small towns in the US that have excellent amenities, and are great places to raise a family.

It’s basically public daycare for a lot of people. Including us.

The social aspect is important for us. The idea of having to find other people with kids for activities sounds exhausting. We’re a gang of neuro-spicy introverts. My social circle is comprised of people I’ve been friends with for 25+ years. All from my school days.

I dealt with a lot of bullshit at school. But overall a net gain.

1. Home schooling does not necessarily (and in most cases) does not mean a kid learning at home with parents. It only means parents have arranged for adequen learning through alternative means.

2. In many cases, multiple parents and their kids come together and take responsibility of their kids education. They may rent spaces, they may hire teachers and so on.

3. In many cases you have to satisfy government penpushers that you are doing a good job of this.

Advocating for homeschooling is simply advocating for absolutely no regulation on schooling, which is fine for the Zuckerbergs and will condemn children like the Duggars.

as a former child I think home schooling is better in every way if there is a supporting environment built around it, but I also think public schooling introduces a lot of variety that is not seen in private or home schooling be it for better or worse, although my time in public school was rough and failed me in many ways I still wouldn't have it any other way.

I guess homeschooling fits well with extreme individualistic American culture, no surprises there.

Also, I see a lot of people arguing that exposure to “bad” kids is a point in favor of public schools, which seems insane to me. Growing up with a friend group of good kids is probably the biggest predictor of what a child’s adult life will look like.

Of course people are fleeing public schooling when we’re selling the kids to big tech for laptops and services that require network connection to write a word document, enable cheating, and their data sold for profit without consent.

"I got to spend time with my kids when they still wanted to spend time with me. Now as teenagers in no longer cool, but that's ok. I got my time with them and that makes me happy"

1 kid: one year behind but doing very well

1 kid: two years behind and not doing so well (in fact can't continue to academia unless things change drastically, in other words, will lose at least 1-2 more years if she does go to academia)

1 kid: two years behind and doing pretty well

This is the result of 9-11 years of public schooling. I feel like all 3 have very suboptimal outcomes, including the one doing very well.

I must say I am also getting very irritated by the "indoctrination". That was fine, if occasionally crazy, during the COVID years when the indoctrination was pretty progressive. Sometimes batshit insane, but let's say "well intentioned". Pro-climate claims ... that were bullshit, but at least pro-climate and generally positive and pro-humanity. Now one of their teachers is openly racist (in a class with 33% immigrants), and even though most keep it more subtle than him, this is a general trend.

So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.

Keep them going to public school and give up?

Well funded public education is a bedrock of fair equal society (which is why the right attacks it ever since its invention).

Public education isn’t perfect but it is far better for individual and society than any alternative (including any religious run schools)

This is not surprising: homeschoolers are extremely confident in their own teaching abilities and extremely cynical about the abilities of others.

> Closures also gave parents a chance to experience public schools' competence with remote learning, and many were unimpressed. They have also been unhappy with the poor quality and often politicized lessons taught to their children that infuriatingly blend declining learning outcomes with indoctrination.

Why would a parent compare a novel learning environment to the pre-covid experience? Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home - do they use the internet at all?

https://wonderyearsschool.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@asim-qureshi/videos

He has been documenting his children's homeschooling journey and I have to say the results are beyond amazing.

All of the kids were done with "high school" level education before the age of 15.

Daughters going to Oxford and Cambridge. They were accepted at 16 I think but the University told them they could not join until they turn 18.

In a way this is a return to older times when children would learn the trades of their parents. I think that's great, but I do wonder how kids will acquire the broader education. Knowing how to program is really only a small part of what makes me valuable.

I have a 15yo son who plays sports and for the past 5 years, homeschooling has been a way to "red-shirt" kids - hold them back a year or two then re-entering them into public schools into grades behind their age. Literally purposely holding back their kids so they can be older as freshman.

A major problem with boys because of puberty, size etc around this age. The difference between a 14yo and a 16yo, or 16/18yo can be quite large at times. My son had a freshman on his team last year that could drive and had a mustache playing vs these tiny incoming freshman, it was so comical. He was 16 1/2 as a freshman. And the parents were on the sideline acting like their kid was the next coming of Aaron Judge. It REALLY hurts the rest of us playing the rules and taking education seriously when our kids are trying to make a team.

I've known several of these parents and they all are the same. They haphazardly put them into the bare min online courses, still go to work all day and stick them in front of computers to expect them to self teach for a few years. The moms would be stay-home types that didn't seem much educated themselves. The kids are spoiled entitled types who think they are top athletes already and would jokingly be calling my son at 11a telling him they are done already for the day and headed to the gym and playing Fortnite.

Now this is just MY circle, I am not saying there aren't very serious and capable parents out there really homeschooling and giving their kids a better education than public school, but I haven't met any in maybe roughly 10 I know. Most of them seemed to also be MAGA types poo-pooing public education and how they are brainwashing kids. It is really despicable that this is most likely happening ALL across America.

Education and manipulation aside, I would also think this isn't good the kids mental and social health as well. They already are on devices doom-scrolling enough nowadays, do we really want them hermits too now?

I applaud anyone putting in huge effort to home school a kid properly and with true care and teaching. But the image of them at a desk being taught by a real smart/educated parent following a true curriculum all day and on a schedule I imagine is ultra rare. And we are going to pay a price for this in the long run. Or not, GPT will just help them along to properly write that email for them when they are adults in a corporate world.

We ended up moving our son to yet a third district after 2nd grade. Why? Because the principal he had in his elementary school mishandled an incident where three boys of another ethnicity shoved and kicked my son to the ground. The principal, in her infinite wisdom, made my son apologize to his attackers, I guess because he is white? We didn't press the matter, why bother? The handwriting was on the wall. We put in the work to open enroll him in another district, instead. Those are the options that many more rural communities lack.

Our current district is a bit further of a drive and that makes him/us feel like he is not really a part of that community. Nonetheless, it has done well for him and I will just come right out and say it's because it is less diverse and more affluent. It is not without its problems--mainly being far too sports-centric than the district my daughter attended, and generally a bit snobby and "affluenza"-ish, but no overt violence to speak of hardly.

One time we were leaving a football game one time and happened upon a family presenting their daughter with a brand new Range Rover, complete with a bow, in the school parking lot. Puke-o-rama! Why would you do that except to show off consumption and appearance of wealth to everyone else? Luckily, not that common, but you get the picture.

The good thing is, we had options and exercised them, but I wish we hadn't needed to, because we like our community and wanted to support it and the local families nearer to us. Every choice we made to get something we also had to give up something else. I think that's the same with homeschooling, too--I don't personally think it's a good idea, but it's not up to me how someone else chooses to educate their kids and I understand about only having certain options. My son is doing very well, now in high school, but he can never make a sports team because the competition is beyond ridiculous. Even tennis he got on some low rung team because there were a couple of superstar 7th graders who filled up JV and Varsity slots! It felt like a sort-of "old boy" situation because my son is pretty decent at tennis and beat one of those younger guys every time he played him. Forget football or basketball, you have to be pretty much college material to be on those teams. Hockey, same. My daughter never cared about sports, so we weren't prepared for that battle at all.

Getting children through school and into adulthood is not for the faint of heart.

One thing that concerns me about many pro-homeschooling comments is a kind of tear-down-the-schools attitude, as if schools were hopeless and irredeemable, despite the fact they're still educating 94% of students even at today's elevated homeschooling rate. Of course there are problems with schools, but on the other hand there are countless success stories, or at least countless non-failure stories, and educational outcomes tend to depend crucially on local factors, the location of the school and its socioeconomic environment.

I suspect that the vast majority of parents have neither the desire nor the capability to homeschool their kids. I certainly can't imagine my own parents doing it. In a sense, homeschooling is a luxury of the few. The absolute numbers can increase, but I don't think homeschooling can scale to the entire population. So whatever problems may exist in the schools, we have to confront and solve them, not just abandon them and pretend homeschooling is a societal solution. You might claim that hundreds of years ago, everyone was homeschooled, but I don't want to turn back the societal clock hundreds of years.

Another concern I have is the religious and/or political motivation of many homeschoolers. If homeschooling were just about educational outcomes for children, then we shouldn't expect homeschoolers to be disproportionately conservative in religious and/or political beliefs, yet my impression is that they are. It's certainly suspicious to me. And though I've had no involvement with K-12 education since I was in school myself, I've had a lot of involvement in higher education, first as an undergrad, then as a PhD student and lecturer. Frankly, the horror stories and conspiracy theories about left-wing indoctrination at universities are ridiculous and not based on fact or experience. So I'm quite skeptical of similar claims about K-12, especially since I saw none of that in my own childhood. (I recall being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, for all the good that did.) There's a type of person who's set off if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and consider that to be an act of war against them. There are still a lot of parents in the United States who reject biological evolution and would prefer that it not be taught in schools at all, or at least to be taught as "controversial."

I'm a bit of a unique case in that "it really should have been an unbelievable mess": this was done, almost entirely, while divorced from Mom. And we were not "amicable" through much of it. It was a decision we had both committed to before the kids were born and stuck with after the divorce. I have two children, not 4+ (maybe that's just my experience, but the first family I talked to about this had 7). I didn't do it for religious reasons, bullying reasons, "I hate teachers or public schools" reasons or because I wanted my children to win a bunch of spelling bees. I did it after researching options and concluding that I could educate my two children better than any other option available to them and I could do so without them spending all day in books. I believed I was taught arithmetic in a manner that made it harder for me to understand Algebra[0], and I didn't feel I was ever encouraged or otherwise directed "to learn skills and subjects on my own." The top two, though, were "I wanted self-learners" and I, my son and my daughter are diagnosed ASD (type 1); Mom probably is, too, but getting a diagnosis as an adult is combinations of difficult/pointless.

After the early years (probably 4th grade on, earlier for my youngest), the average Home School day became 45 minutes of book/traditional learning work (often less) from Home School curriculum, usually another 45 minutes of self-directed study and for the most part the rest of the day was for themselves to direct (with restrictions; video games were limited to creative and some other specific titles but our children had far more freedom than most). We did weekday only (with a lot of vacation) and September-April. There was simply no way to make the materials go any longer.

They did not take tests (at least, not in the way they're taken at school) until they took their first test in 7th and 9th grade. We, like most Home School parents, started off trying to "replicate school approaches" at home and discovered most of them exist because of schools. My favorite is "grades." If someone asked, "4.0". And they'd assume it's "because I'm Dad" and assume I'm grading lax. I'm not grading at all. We work on the material until it is learned above proficiently. And as a parent Home Schooling, that is the only path to success that doesn't involve misery because if you let them have a mulligan on something, it'll be built upon later and you and they will drown. You need grades in mainstream school, you need "pass/fail" with an "A" being the bar for passing in Home Schools.

I didn't admit most of this in the past, especially not the "45 minute" bit. I straight up lied about it to anyone who wasn't a Home School parent. I had family and friends actively discouraging me every single year that I did this. I admit it, now, because they're top students in their mainstream school and have been since day 1.

My children, like everyone else's, got lonely after the COVID lockdowns and we'd always told them they can decide what to do when my oldest reaches High School. It was sad, suddenly every kid is home but nobody's allowed to play together and even if they could, all of their peers were spending the whole day trying to replicate a classroom via video-calls. My kids were lonely, bored, and unhappy. The day-time Home School activities (that most people are completely unaware of) had been tried up for two years and didn't seem to be coming back. So we put them in Public Schools and lucked out that Mom was located the #4 district and the #1 High School in that district. It's been four years; my son is a Senior.

That first test taking experience landed them in accelerated courses. They started with and have continued to have a 4.0 GPA. They get the homework done at school. They might study for mid-terms and finals. My daughter, last year, I think had half of her classes with every single point earned. They've bested me in every imaginable way (I had a rocking 2.5 GPA in High School). They take school very seriously, but every year they've had a portion of the class that's been review from things we did in Home School.

If it seems unbelievable that I'd get these results on so little time, have a conversation with other Home School parents (assuming their children have some external validation to their education, otherwise we all lie). Consider that I have two children, not 20. You can basically read your own child's mind up until they reach their teens (much longer if they spend most of their time around you instead of peers at school). Being able to read your student's mind is an incredibly unfair advantage. It's not even that "you notice more quickly when you're going to slow or they're not understanding" it's that you anticipate it. I knew what parts of math I would have to slow down with for my son, they were different for my daughter (long division was daily fits with tears and all for a few weeks). Most of the time, with learning, there's a lot of burst/buffer/stall cycles and the sending and receiving end take a long time to figure out when one is in a sub-optimal state. We didn't do rigorous lesson plans (that's for keeping a class full of kids on the same page), we let them dictate how fast or slow we moved based on how much or little they struggle.

I hesitate to say "Just because we only spent 45 minutes in the books doesn't mean we didn't spend the rest of the day learning in other ways" but if you saw how a day was conducted, you'd conclude we didn't. My kids were enrolled in extra-curricular activities, but probably fewer than most mainstream school kids. They had weekly random activities that would be considered "field trips" in school. We were probably more strict than most parents with some things, because we could be: my kids received their first mobile phones at, I think, 13 and 15. We allowed no more than two hours per day of "watching a video, television show or movie." But (outside of inappropriate content) they were mostly unrestricted with which video games they could play and they played plenty (my daughter can slaughter me in just about everything, but I stopped playing for a decade while they were young). My daughter has taught herself to read music, guitar tabs and play Guitar, Bass, Piano and she sings. I played piano for 15 years and she's learned in a year what it took me five with formal lessons. She's taught herself to paint. My son is mini-me, computers, 3D printers, CNC, programming and any other electronic toy.

The reason I didn't do it for, though, turned out to be the reason I'm most thankful that I accepted the minor sacrifice: I wouldn't have had the arrogance to pray for the closeness and kind of relationship I have with my kids, today. I know my parents dreaded going to parent-teacher conferences. Those are my favorite!

[0] And, unintentionally favored an approach that ended up becoming Common Core math in my state, which is just loathed by parents ... which is too bad, because it worked very well for my own kids.

I'm just going to say that "homeschooling" is not a single thing and it's useless to pretend it is. In fact, "public school" is not a single thing and it's mostly useless to pretend it is.

I went to public school. My kids were a combination of public primary school, home schooling, and local community colleges. That experience gives me... well, very little in terms of predicting or understanding what others' experiences were like.

50-kid public schools (the size I went to) can be great for interacting with a diverse group of people -- like, actually interacting with them, not just attending the same school as them. It's also common for "diverse" in this case to mean "kids from a range of socioeconomic situations who are 95% the same race or religion" -- most small schools draw upon a small rural population that is often pretty homogeneous. (That was my experience.)

500-kid public schools naturally have much more diversity in total, but are totally random in terms of what an individual kid will actually experience. It's common for the kids to rigidly stratify themselves. It doesn't matter if there's a kid of a different color from you in your math class if you're surrounded by people like you and he's surrounded by people like him. Athletics are better at mixing people (by forcing a different stratification!), but it's easy to avoid having to deal with "them" even there if you don't want to.

Home schooling varies even more.

Yet that whole argument is also pushing a narrative of "good" vs "bad": being forced together with diverse people is good, so environments where that happens are better! But that's not true either, there are tradeoffs. I'll describe it in terms of stereotypes: public school kids get more exposure and experience with a wider range of kids their age. Home schooled kids get more exposure and experience with adults and kids of other ages. (I'm not saying either of these is universally true, but just go with it for now.) Which is better? You can argue that it's critical to survive the social pressure cooker of traditional schooling because you'll have to handle the same situations as an adult. But you can also argue that if you look at what's happening in public schools, those kids may be good at dealing with each other but they're often failing when faced with the real world. They depend on the collective consciousness that comes from being surrounded by similar-aged people physically and electronically, they're helpless when the responsibility is no longer diffused and they are actually the one and only person who can solve a situation, and they have a sense of entitlement that anything hard is unfair. The stereotypical homeschooled kid is vastly more prepared for many life situations.

So which environment is "better"? mu

https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20...

A former teacher of the year, Gatto became very influential in early homeschooling movements.

Parents or potential parents interested in education and schooling might also want to read Maria Montessori, and John Holt's books "How Children Fail" and "How Children Learn."

We as a species actually know quite a bit about raising children, socialization, and education. I think we get duped by our surrounding society and government institutions hijacking those goals in service of control, indoctrination, conformity, and maintaining class and power structures. Schools serve just as much, if not more, to prepare children to work as "productive" members of a capitalist culture, to do what they get told, as they do to teach our kids anything or help them learn to get along with other people. Call me an anarchist or Marxist, I don't care.

My parents started homeschooling me because the public schools near where they lived then were supposedly subpar (Miami in the mid 80s, I have no idea if what they believed is true). When they moved to Michigan in 89 they continued homeschooling me and later my younger sister because they’d gotten used to it and a big court case had just been won (or was shortly after we moved) making it officially legal there.

I never complained because I did have a good social group through church, the neighborhood, and a strong homeschool group in the area that organized weekly park days, some coop classes with professional teachers, but more than any of that it gave me so much freedom.

My mom did a good job teaching me by 4th or 5th grade how to teach myself given course material, the library, and her or my dad when I needed more. She did standardized testing for us every year and I was able to complete 12th grade just before turning 17. They pushed me to use the local community college for math and science by 14 because they didn’t feel equipped with more advanced topics. They got me into summer science camps at the college I ended up attending and getting my undergrad at.

Every family I knew in the group were doing it for different reasons and did things differently but shared tips, curriculum, and really their lives with us. It was a very tight knit community despite spanning over 600 square miles. Some probably got stronger educations and more opportunities, for many different reasons, socioeconomic and others. As I remember most were well adjusted and successful as adults.

I mentioned freedom above and I’ll end on that. Once I’d been taught how to teach myself the sky was the limit. I had the opportunity to focus 4 hours straight on school work and then to work with my dad at construction sites, swinging a hammer, eventually part of a crew of 4 every afternoon building houses or whatever. That started at age 12. By 14 I wrote my first business plan with a friend, raised $10k from family and private investors, and started my first business (VRcade in Jackson MI, summer of 96). By 16 I had an IT consultancy. I don’t think I’d have had as many opportunities like that if I’d been at the local highschool from 7:30-2:30pm every day. I had friends at the school and a few of them worked service jobs after school but that was pretty rare.

So what did I do for my two kids? We chose public (charter) school for them but we got super involved. My wife and I volunteer there a few hours a week, teaching gardening and helping where needed. Neither of us felt we had the patience or skills to be full time educators and Covid proved that out when the kids were home for 6 months. I’m still not sure what magic my mom used to teach me how to teach myself. The important thing is we found our community at the school and amazing teachers, many of whom have been there 1-3 decades.

I am trying to instill the values and initiative my parents (both entrepreneurs) empowered me with. We’ve been paying for instruction for our 11yo at a (unofficial) trade school for a few years and now the same school pays them to help with instruction when they have big beginner classes. My youngest is leaning more towards tech like me and is super into games so I’m going to try and stretch my generalist programming skills to empower them in that arena.

All this to say I think it’s ok to have many ways to do things and find the way that fits your family. I really appreciate public schools because many wouldn’t have the opportunity for an education otherwise and I try to contribute back to that as much as I can even though it wasn’t my experience. And I support those who have chosen homeschooling and figured out how to make it work. Private schools I’m a little more meh on but I’ll do my best not to judge, lol.

I raised and homeschooled three children. One of my daughters homeschooled from second grade to the time she started college. My other two children decided to attend public school at various ages, and then mixed that with homeschooling because I didn't force them to attend school.

Infants have obvious personality tendencies. Some seem curious and outgoing, others afraid and nervous. Some babies seem happy and comfortable with other people, and some recoil and cry when approached. They don't start as blank slates. The family environment, siblings, peers, and the school environment can exacerbate innate tendencies or push children to change. A shy child may withdraw and develop social anxiety at school, or turn more extroverted and confident. Personality traits change throughout our lives, and that happens faster and often more dramatically in young children.

"School," "homeschooling," and "socialization" don't describe specific or uniform experiences, though people use those terms as if they do. Some children have loving and nurturing home environments, some suffer abuse. Some children attend well-funded and staffed schools, others spend their years in a prison-like environment with the emphasis on crowd control. Some teachers have a talent for teaching and subject mastery, they can inspire children to learn. Others seem resentful, incompetent, disengaged, even cruel. General statements about public schools, teachers, and the process of socialization don't mean anything because of huge variations across broad spectrums in multiple dimensions.

When asked, teachers will cite parental engagement as the most important determinant of student success. Many, probably most, parents use school (starting with infant daycare) as a place to park their kids while they work, trusting strangers they rarely meet to raise their children. When you watch a classroom of children interact with the teacher and each other you can pick out the kids who have involved parents and those who don't. Of course most parents have no choice for economic reasons. Homeschooled kids tend to come from two-parent middle (I'd say upper middle) class families for that reason -- few families can afford to have one or both parents lose so much work time. Several studies of homeschooled children implicate family socio-economic status and income in the success of the children, already advantaged compared to the majority of public school kids.

Parents take a wide range of approaches to raising children, generally with little or no training or preparation. You have a child and suddenly you have complete responsibility for another human being, making decisions on the fly, subjected to conflicting advice and guidance. That other human being has their own personality, will, requirements, and eventually desires and opinions, and you have to discover those and adapt to them because children don't come with labels or documentation. Some parents pay little attention to their kids, often because the parents have too many economic, relationship, or other problems of their own. Some parents treat their kids as extensions of themselves, a chance for a do-over, version 2.0, and will start prepping their child for the future the parent wishes they had regardless of the child's inclinations and desires. Some parents want to control their children, usually in the name of protecting their child from the world. Parents who don't recognize and respect their children as separate individuals can do a lot of damage, both in socialization and in academics, and you see the results with both schooled and homeschooled children.

In fifteen years of homeschooling my own children I spent a lot of time with other homeschooling parents. The terms "homeschooling parent" and "homeschooler" refer to such a broad spectrum of motivations and approaches that they doesn't usefully describe anything at all. Some parents want to raise their children in a faith tradition (I met fundamentalist Christian parents, Mormons, Muslims, Jews). Some parents want to raise their children with no faith tradition (secular homeschoolers), but then push their own woo-woo and new-agey beliefs on their kids (opposition to vaccines, mindfulness, astrology, homeopathy, "Indigo children," etc.). Both religious and secular homeschoolers can indoctrinate and control their children, and put their own beliefs, desires, frustrations, and fantasies into their kids' heads. I call that another form of not respecting the child as an individual.

The socialization topic comes up so much when talking about homeschooling that I have to say something about it. Whether schooled or homeschooled, children get exposed to adults, other children, and peers their own age. Each child will react and adapt to their specific circumstances according to their personality. Nothing inherently prevents homeschooled kids from enjoying a rich social life, but parents often restrict social activities, and with whom their kids socialize. Nothing inherent about the school environment magically "socializes" kids. Some children thrive in the school environment, others graduate or drop out with emotional trauma. Some schools offer more stable and safe environments than others, largely a function of ZIP Code in the USA.

Homeschooling at its best takes parental engagement to the extreme: parents take complete control over, and responsibility for, their child's education both academically and socially. Parents might get good results from the right schools if they engage with the teachers and pick the right school (thus the popularity of private schools). Parents who recognize and respect the individuality of their children, and don't treat them as clones or property, who actively take part in educating their child (whether at home or school), have a good chance at raising a well-adjusted and functional adult. The less the parents engage and take responsibility, the less the parents respect their children as discrete individuals, the more likely they will raise a child with academic failings and maladjusted personalities.

Look at the results all around us, the products of public schooling and disengaged parenting. Homeschooled kids may have the same problems, but in my experience that happens less often, especially if you exclude the large number of religious fundamentalist homeschoolers in America.

Specifically for the HN crowd (to which I belong)... people who work in the software profession that cannot measure what we call productivity, a profession that cannot agree on "best practices" around even trivial things like indenting, should step back and take a more humble approach to opining and lecturing about parenting, education, and homeschooling. No one knows the right or best way to raise children, or how to "properly" educate them. Instead we have a lot of opinions and traditions and government-imposed rules, some useful and some bullshit. As parents we have to sift through all of that and make decisions on the fly that can dramatically affect our children for the rest of their lives. We can't refactor away a bully, a cruel teacher, neglect, or the effects of expecting an iPad to substitute for attention and care.

I heard all the stories about how homeschooled kids get better standardized test scores and generally enter college with fewer remedial courses, better academic outcomes, etc. I heard all the arguments that "actually, we do socialize, because we can still do Scouts and sports and blah blah blah."

It was all horse shit.

I do not know a single homeschooling family that did not have an issue with the parents eventually slacking off on checking up that the kids were doing the work. And, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the kids just skipped doing any work for most of the year. There would be a mad scramble at the end of the year to concoct a fraudulent portfolio to present to the state-required evaluator. And when the dust settled and all the spankings were done and all the tears were dried, new promises were made to not do it next year. New threats were made that you could "get up at 6am and get on that bus."

It took me until my 40s to realize it wasn't my fault. The people who were the responsible party--i.e. my parents--stopped acting responsibly. The person who is so incapable of being responsible that the state won't even let them drink, drive, or vote (all activities infinitely easier than trying to teach yourself)--i.e. my self--was the one who had all the blame lumped on him.

This wasn't a unique experience. I think maybe 1 kid out of the 30 I knew did not have this experience at least once in their homeschooling life. That one kid was perhaps the smartest, most mature of us; or perhaps she just feared her parents the most. She's also dead now, having killed herself in her early 30s.

For me, it was 4 times.

It was incredibly traumatizing. I lived the first 20 years of my adult life believing I was fundamentally a dishonest and untrustworthy person, and therefore unworthy of anything, especially love and career success. What I was was an irresponsible kid, aka "a kid", who had practically no supervision.

Every parent always said publicly they were doing it for academic reasons. In private, amongst themselves, the true reasons came out: sequestration away from "unauthorized" religious, political, and social ideas. And it always, always leaned right. We couldn't go to school because they were Teaching Evolution As If It's Fact When It's Just A Theory At That School. We couldn't go to school because Ever Since The Immigrants Started Moving Here To Take All The Apple Picking Jobs The Crime Has Been Through The Roof At That School (what the local family practice doctor cared about apple picking jobs, I could never figure out as a child). We couldn't go to school because They're Teaching Homosexuality Is Not An Abomination At That School.

Meanwhile, every single child I grew up with had to face a cliff moment where they had to decide if our collective experience was abusive. The few of us who said yes managed to get through college without dropping out, get moved away from home, get through rounds of suicidal ideation, self-medicating, therapy, antidepressants, and maybe eventually coming to terms and having happy productive lives.

Or they said no, it was fine, and they now live in poverty, have broken homes, still-active alcoholism, or are dead from suicide.

My own mother might be developing dementia and doesn't seem to recall at all things my sister and I agree we remember clearly. Things I've heard my friends repeat in their own stories. Things they've said their own parents also deny. I grew up incredibly lonely. My parents not only sequestered my sister and I from our municipal community, but also to some extent from our homeschooling community, because the one silver lining about my own particular experience was that my parents were not religious zealots. I grew up in constant fear of the State taking me away from my parents just because my mother took me to the grocery store during school hours (a thing my mother asserted could happen, so I better behave to not draw attention to us). I grew up believing society was going to collapse at any time. I grew up believing I was certainly going to Hell because, even though my parents claimed to be religious, we didn't go to church.

To this day, despite the intellectual knowledge that I'm really no different than anyone else, I still cannot shake the feeling that I'm always the outsider looking in, always the interloper trying to masquerade inside, and decode the secret workings of, the social groups I'm in.

This is incredibly difficult for me to talk about. There are many things I still cannot talk about, so please resist the online commentator urge to infer things about my current relationships.

I see people today talking about "we're thinking of homeschooling our children." Not just online, but in my own community, too. I want to scream at them that they have no idea what a gigantic mistake they are entering into. Even assuming they can avoid the dishonest reasoning for why they are doing it, even assuming they will perfectly execute an educational plan for their children over the course of 12 years, they are at the vet least forcing an outsider's complex on their children.

Yes, parents who send their children to public school could still be abusive. Yes, children who do go to public school also develop outsider complexes and plenty of other mental health issues. But at least the child will have a better chance to see that there are alternatives. At least the child will have a better chance to learn that they are a member of a shared society. At least the child will have a better chance to become independent from their parents.

There are some parents who might be Yale law grads who might not be rich who opt for some homeschooling given the right situation, but these are the outliers and I'm okay with these, while most aren't.

Maybe the school _environment_ that a child has access isn't great, right? But I don't think that says anything about teachers.

LLM's have revolutionized the way people learn and utilize what they have learned. The future is 8 year old material science lads doing chemistry in their step-mother's RV

TFA does not even begin to grapple with the single most important issue, which is who is actually doing the homeschooling.

This is only an option for certain families, with parents with enough bandwidth and knowhow to do this effectively. That excludes many tens of millions of Americans.

I think this is really about class, race, and religious segregation. Families can do what they want, of course, but this framing makes it sound like failing schools are the whole problem and I don't think that's the whole story.