| ▲ | hereme888 6 hours ago |
| The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against this concept. Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix. 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. |
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| ▲ | array_key_first 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| My general experience is that homeschool children have self esteem and confidence issues precisely because they've been around 'hand picked' people... forever. They've never experienced assholes, or people who think their personality is grating, or whatever. Thick skin needs to be built up, to a degree. I'm not saying bullying is good, but being exposed to the unwashed masses definitely can be. |
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| ▲ | oxag3n 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I watched my kids becoming a median of their classmates. After changing to a private school it was noticeable after a month - different lexicon, mimics, attitude. It's not thick skin they are developing around assholes, it's them incorporating that behavior to some degree. There was nothing I could do to change that - talks, good example, nothing worked, only surrounding change. | |
| ▲ | scoofy 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean… the issue is you have incredibly well educated kids that have an awkward time dealing with assholes. Given the state of our education system, that seems like an obviously worthwhile trade off. Especially for parents in underperforming school districts and even entire regions. |
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| ▲ | aeturnum 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix. Not your problem to fix for sure - but it is your problem to equip your child to comfortably weather. There are bad influences out in the world and they generally have outsized effects on their social and professional scenes. In fact, the kind of curated, limited community you're advocating for is one where bad influences thrive. > So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? I certainly agree the degree is whatever - but I think you're really under-valuing the social-gauntlet aspect of school. You will have classmates who kind of (or really) suck. You will need to do your work anyway. You will be incentivized to learn perseverance and a self-centered locus of control. These are valuable skills that only come from actual exposure to bad influences. Someone who's perfect in perfect conditions is going to struggle because the world is not perfect. The aims you highlight here make me think less of homeschooling than I did before. |
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| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The problem is that what constitutes “healthy” varies so greatly between individuals (especially these days) that it barely carries any objective meaning, and the odds are heavily against any one person’s definition being correct. If I put myself in the shoes of a parent, I wouldn’t trust myself on the matter enough that I’d feel good shaping my childrens’ entire world to match it. It’s such a wildly difficult thing to get right, and I’d rather they get a glimpse of the world through wide variety of viewpoints and hope they’ll use the values I’ve instilled in them to construct their own view. |
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| ▲ | Nextgrid 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children Unless you can magically guarantee (or have enough money to fund their whole life) your children will never have to interact with "problem" people, they will need to learn to deal with those people one way or another. And it's better to do so in a low-stakes situation like school. |
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| ▲ | bentley an hour ago | parent [-] | | Childhood and youth are anything but “low‐stakes.” The social experiences I faced in public school were far worse than even the worst parts of my adult life. The direction I was headed was one of dark cynicism and misanthropy thanks to the bullying I faced and the lack of care from the adults in the system. When I switched to homeschooling, I began interacting with rational adults (my parents’ friends) and in turn learned what functioning human relationships look like. My ability to weather the difficult storms of adulthood in a healthy way came from the social growth I gained through homeschooling, not the regressive “socialization” that public school inflicted on me. |
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| ▲ | bgnn 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What you define here is isolation from the real world. There seems to be a misunderstanding of your understanding of misunderstanding. |
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| ▲ | subpixel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Where I live the schools are quite good and the homeschoolers are fundamental religious families who won’t send their kids to schools where gay pride flags are allowed. I’d pull our child out of school if the standards dropped but I think the majority of homeschoolers align with out of the mainstream poltical / religious views. |
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| ▲ | afavour 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it? I think your view is a very black and white one. Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there. The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe. Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do. |
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| ▲ | zaphar 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out". This is not to say that there aren't some homeschooling parents who practice a form of extreme isolation which produces what I would regard as an equally bad outcome as public school. But by the numbers from people who have studied this the evidence indicates homeschooling produces the best outcomes for social adjustment in Adulthood. Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement which means the child learns how to socialize not from other children but from watching how the adults they are around handle interactions. [Edited for clarity in some sentences] | | |
| ▲ | afavour 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out". You are aware of teachers, yes? > Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement Everything I've read shows that putting absolutely all else aside, parental involvement is key to a child's success. So perhaps the reason your by the numbers evidence shows home schooling to be better is simply because it's a self-selecting group of involved parents. | | |
| ▲ | zaphar 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Teachers at a school do not fill the same role that homeschooling parents do in theses situations. |
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| ▲ | MrDrMcCoy 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Counterpoint from my own experience having been previously homeschooled all the way to college: My parents went the extra mile to ensure I was constantly immersed in large group settings with other homeschoolers. Field trips, co-op classes, sports, and general high-quality social time. There were of course bad eggs as in any group setting, but with an important difference: if it ever got bad, it was possible to leave, and we did on occasion. In my mind, that's far more in keeping with the "real world" than the seeming entrapment of public schooling that offers little recourse for when social experiences sour. In the real world, you have the freedom to leave a toxic job or social group far more so than public school. In addition to peer socialization and mobility, the flexibility in scheduling allowed me to work a day job through my high school years, exposing me to yet more real-world experience. The constant interaction with adults and folks from other walks of life was a huge boon that allowed me to function as a well-adjusted adult right out of the gate. The high-school drama that people suffer and then bring with them into adulthood is very disappointing and seemingly unnecessary. | | |
| ▲ | hereme888 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | ^^^ That's my experience interacting with healthily homeschooled children-now-adults. On average they seemed to have so much less trauma than me and my peers, and less "subconscious" issues to deal as adults. |
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| ▲ | emtel 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It absolutely is. If you are well equipped to navigate the adult world, you place yourself in hand-picked groups of people. I do not work with, socialize with, or live near a random sample of the population, and I highly doubt most people reading this thread do either! | | |
| ▲ | HaZeust 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah but how do you LEARN the ability to do that? To keep that practice always in your mental backburner, and remembering how important it is? Why, you learn it by seeing the impacts from those succumbed to negative influences they surrounded themselves with! You can't learn the application of hand-picking your people and environments if you don't first see the outcomes when such application is neglected, and understanding its importance from there. If you have the hand-picking done for you as well, you risk not learning the ability to do it yourself. Or how to handle the situations where you can't. |
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| ▲ | billy99k 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "..a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?" School isn't their only exposure to life. You will get exposure to other people and non-healthy people outside of school. "Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in th" When I was a kid, I was exposed to kids that should have been in prison..and many of them ended up there. My life probably would have been better if they weren't there. "My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there." This can still be done with home schooling. "The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe." I disagree. If someone is hostile and aggressive all the time, I wouldn't be around them as an adult. I hand pick my friends, and you probably do too. I also still get exposed to the assholes of the world. "Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do." If you are at work and someone is sexually harassing all of the women there or generally causing issues for everyone around them (preventing most other people from getting their work done). Do you think they should stay, so everyone can learn to be around them? You seem to think everyone is a reasonable person that might just have a few issues. This is far from the truth and many times, public schools will just keep these kids there, preventing everyone around them from learning. It's also a burden to the teachers and staff. | |
| ▲ | seneca 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it? It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public. "The real world" is highly filtered social circles and freedom of association. The idea that it's somehow an automatic good to force healthy kids to mix with everyone who happens to show up, regardless of whether they have severe behavioral or social issues, is pretty questionable. > My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there. You can expose your kids to different cultures without leaving them wide open to everything else. It's not a binary. The point is that home schooling lets you pick and choose. | | |
| ▲ | pdabbadabba 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public. I'm baffled by this. Many workplaces? Mass transit? Walking down the sidewalk? At a concert? Buying groceries? True, there don't all expose you to the full sweep of human existence at once but, in aggregate, it seems pretty similar to what you'd encounter at most public schools. What if they want a career in a hospital, or law enforcement, or social services, ... the list goes on. You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble, but it seems to me they need to be prepared for a future where they encounter all kinds of people. I'm sure this can be compatible with homeschooling but I can't see how it's not generally a disadvantage. (Though perhaps onerous clearly outweighed by other advantages, depending on the situation.) | | |
| ▲ | moduspol 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The closest social equivalency to public school socialization I can think of is prison. You're stuck there for N hours per day with limited or zero control over what other people you're around. Maybe parts of military training might also be similar. That's the kind of thing that is very much not like the "real world." It's more than just being "exposed" to less optimal peers (like you would on a bus), it's an entirely different social experience. | |
| ▲ | WrongAssumption 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Home schooled kids walk down sidewalks, go to concerts, go grocery shopping. Most workplaces are highly filtered. The whole interview process is specifically geared towards filtering out undesirable people. | |
| ▲ | antonymoose 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You don’t have to sit side-by-side rubbing shoulders and squabbling with rabble for 12 years in order to understand and deal with it, just like you don’t have to wrestle with gators for 12 years to learn respect for nature. | |
| ▲ | brendoelfrendo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble I think it's telling that the other responses seem to focus on exactly this; the idea that their child will exist in a class apart from the rabble, and will not have to interact with them. It seems to speak to two very different views of community. On the one hand, there is community as a collection of all the people in a space: people who share local resources, frequent the same local businesses, and have the same local concerns. On the other, there is a community of choice: people who share the same social class, and possibly the same religion or cultural beliefs. I think it's fair to say that you can have both, but trying to say that you can belong solely to the communities you choose and treat everyone else as beneath notice sounds quite problematic, and it will absolutely not give children a correct or complete view of the world. |
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| ▲ | afavour 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public I think "forced" is doing a lot of work there. No, you're not forced to work alongside someone problematic. But quitting your job is quite an escalation to deal with the issue. Same with a troublesome neighbor. To say nothing of public transit, taking flights, interacting with other drivers on the road... |
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| ▲ | hereme888 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think your reading is very black and white. Add some leeway to what I say. Hand-picked obviously doesn't mean all friends go through a psych screening on a daily basis, or that you have to helicopter-parent and tell your kids who to be friends with... | | |
| ▲ | afavour 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > or you have to helicopter-parent and tell your kids who to be friends with... Isn't that essentially what you're describing, though? You literally talked about "healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children". No, you don't have to tell them who to be friends with... but you've pre-selected the pool of potential friends, so there's no instruction necessary. | | |
| ▲ | all2 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do not be deceived, bad company corrupts good morals.
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| ▲ | meheleventyone 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I mean you’re literally explaining how your home schooled kids are separated from the real world. |
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| ▲ | superconduct123 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Public school doesn't really represent "the real world" for everyone anyway If you go to university and into a professional career you end up in a different bubble of people than say going into trades | |
| ▲ | hereme888 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Define "real world". | | |
| ▲ | meheleventyone 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The one that exists with problem children and opinions you don’t like. As a parent I get the impulse to remove my children from any potential harm but the real world has sharp edges. They need to be confident in that world not just smothered. And really as the person who used the term it’s really up to you to define what you mean. | | |
| ▲ | leobg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Can you pick even a single person that will agree with you on everything? You could be around 10 if your identical twins and there’d still be conflict. Why is it more „natural” if the school does the picking? Besides, parents can’t command anyone to join. It’s not The Truman Show. Is marriage not “real life” because you chose your partner? Does you choosing prevent disagreement, struggle, pain and growth? I don’t think so. | |
| ▲ | seneca 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The one that exists with problem children and opinions you don’t like. That's just not true though. Your job isn't going to force you to interact with people who disrupt the environment constantly. Those people are fired and removed from the group. | | |
| ▲ | hereme888 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Exactly. Adults don't tolerate the same B.S. children are forced into. | |
| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | AnimalMuppet 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave. In the military, say, you don't get that option. In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while. So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.) | | |
| ▲ | seneca 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave. Agreed! And that is exactly what home-schooling families are doing. Choosing to leave a dysfunctional environment. > In the military, say, you don't get that option. Yep, and other government institutions, like prison. I don't think those are what anyone would call a typical life environment though. > In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while. That's another dysfunctional environment, and also what the police are for. > So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.) You're right, you can't. The world has a lot of dysfunctional environments, and I agree that people need to learn how to deal with them. Knowingly forcing your child to be in one of those environments full-time for many years seems like a pretty horrible way to teach them that though, bordering on abusive. | | |
| ▲ | array_key_first 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Public school is not dysfunctional, per se. And, to be clear, EVERY workplace will have people you don't like. Every. Single. One. No exceptions. Kids needs to be taught resiliency and healthy mindsets, to a degree. They need to learn to live and let go, to learn their value isn't derived from what people think of them, to learn that embarrassment is self inflicted. You just can't do that if you're only around people who don't challenge you. If you're in a nice, cushy, social bubble, you will develop self esteem and confidence issues. |
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| ▲ | meheleventyone 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | My job isn’t the totality of my life and you have very strange ideas about how quickly disruptive people actually get fired. You get plenty of unfiltered interaction in life. If anything I’d say the sort of thing you describe sounds more like an insular cult. Although even there you get misanthropic people, abuse and so on. | | |
| ▲ | seneca 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > My job isn’t the totality of my life and you have very strange ideas about how quickly disruptive people actually get fired. You get plenty of unfiltered interaction in life. In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up? The only instances I can think of are other government-run institutions like the military or prison, and I don't think anyone would argue those are standard modes of "real life". > If anything I’d say the sort of thing you describe sounds more like an insular cult. Name calling isn't an argument. | | |
| ▲ | BrenBarn 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up? Have you heard of customer service? | |
| ▲ | meheleventyone 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Anywhere you happen to be in public essentially. I also didn’t call you names just stated that your description sounded cult like. If your environment is so controlled to not have a good mix of people in it then that sounds even more cult like! | |
| ▲ | FireBeyond 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up? I was a paramedic. Every single day. |
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| ▲ | FireBeyond 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I get that on one hand, such regulation is one of the reasons some parents do so, but the wide diversity of "oversight" is challenging. In Washington, homeschooled students still have to occasionally connect at an actual school, or do some baseline testing. In Louisiana, you just tell the state "we're homeschooling" and the state is "have fun with that" and the child is essentially off the grid. Not for nothing, instances of child abuse/CSA in many correlates with the laxness of educational oversight in home schooling. > And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students. Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom. For all your anecdotes my step daughter has plenty too. 10th graders who are barely literate, cannot do elementary math. Who when asked about their homeschool regime talk of waking at 10, 10.30, playing Fortnite or going on Tiktok for a few hours, and occasionally logging into some website to pretend like they've been working, or doing some mind numbingly simple exercise to show "participation". |
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| ▲ | ryandrake 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom. Exactly. Notice how, when people complain about the "deranged ideologies" that teachers are teaching their kids, they either 1. stop short of actually naming those ideologies or 2. spout fever dreams that are statistically vanishingly rare. |
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| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | joshstrange 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know. I'm sure they exist, they may even exist as the majority, I will say for my part the homeschooled kids I knew through my church growing up were not any of these things. I would quite literally use the opposite of both those to describe them. I'm not saying they represent the majority but they do exist and they were not well adjusted IMHO. As with many topics I feel like "Yes, if you want to devote yourself fully to X thing you can do much better than Y professional", the problem is, again from my own experience, the people I knew who homeschooled their children were not professionals, they were not capable, and their children suffered for it. I want to stress, I fully believe it is possible for certain people with certain mentors/teachers to do better outside of the public (or private) school system. I just also believe that the odds of most people (making that decision for their children) to meet that bar are low. I also think that some of the better homeschooled experiences that I've seen are simply a super-private school by another name (various parents being or being subject experts and taking turns teaching coupled with many "field trip"-type trips with other homeschooled kids). > there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students. Wait till you hear what the parents believe... I don't agree with everything taught or the way it's taught but being exposed to other types of people and ways of thinking is critical. I can guarantee you that had my parents been able to, they would have shielded me from a great number of ways of thinking. I worry that many homeschooled children grow up in a small echo chamber (we all live in echo chambers of difference sizes). Can public school suck? Absolutely and I acknowledge that homeschooling might be the answer for some people, but only if you can afford to pay (with time or money) to educate your children completely which is almost certainly going to require working with other homeschooler parents to, essentially, build your own school. If you can bring in tutors/mentors/teachers that you vet and agree with and expose them to the world and new ideas/experiences then yeah, you are probably going to have good outcomes. If you plop them in front of a computer to follow a curriculum just to shield them from the "evils" of the world, well, I think you are going to have a bad time. Obviously there is a whole range of people in between those 2 extremes, I just feel that, on average, people trend towards the lower end of that spectrum. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE... Interesting song and I do agree with many points. For many years I've complained about lack of teaching basic skills (everything from home ec to budgeting and more), many of which I heard in this song. I think there was a little of the baby going out with the bathwater but overall I enjoyed it. |
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| ▲ | hereme888 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > song Yea, the guy later made a video clarifying he never meant to throw the baby out, just the bathwater. |
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| ▲ | codingdave 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students. You really might want to explain that further. At face value, that sounds like parroted right-wing rhetoric. |
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| ▲ | dzonga 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| there's was a famous paper written by a former school teacher which advocated for home schooling ? I been trying to find it ever since |
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