Growing up, everyone felt pity for them, as they grew up sheltered and not very well educated. In modern times, I feel like this has been magnified significantly.

I’d only do it if your kid was getting the absolute shit kicked out of them at school(s). Social media makes it extremely easy to get chain-bullied at multiple schools even with a transfer or two.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 them 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 kid 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.

Then you’ve heard wrong.

Homeschooling can’t give kids social interaction, which is just as important as the material. You can always tutor your kids in addition to what happens in school if you think the quality is low.

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.

I was homeschooled K-12 and never went to college, so home school is literally all I know and I have thoughts.

1. Motivation matters - I was home schooled for religious reasons by parents who were themselves educated but wholly unqualified to teach a single child much less 4 kids. They homeschooled us primarily to avoid the indoctrination of the secular world, where the lies of evolution and gay baby killers reigned supreme. Thus, I was not well educated and didn’t realize it until I got into the work force. I have been battling crippling imposter syndrome ever since I realized how deficient my education was - I’m still in the process of understanding the scope of that deficiency
2. oversight is not optional. In my situation, we were homeschooled without any government involvement or oversight in any way. My parents told me at the time that this was how the laws in my state worked but they also told me to stay away from Truant Officers so I think they were lying. I had no sense of equivalency or where I stood compared to my peers until I was in the process of testing out to get my GED (because weirdly, prospective employees weren’t keen to accept the “diploma” my dad had printed from MS Word) that I saw my percentile rank in various subject
3. Unless you are an educator, don’t try to run a curriculum. If you’re going to homeschool, pay a tutor. If you can’t pay a tutor, probably don’t home school

I know that last bit sounds extreme and I don’t think my home school experience is typical so take it with a grain of salt.

Edit: none of this even addresses the social impacts, which are intense if not mitigated with a lot of sports and group activities, etc

I would not say “often” better academically. It’s up to the resources the parents have. Poor families doing homeschooling end up poorly educated, wealthy educated families are more able to educate. Humans already did this up until the advent of modern public education systems.

In a public school, the idea is that both the rich family and the poor family are offered the same education, and this is better for society as a whole. I will agree that public education isn’t perfect and could be improved in almost every way, but opting for private education is leaving your child’s future up to random chance as dictated by your social status.

At some point you will try to socialize your homeschooled kid. If you live in a rough community where drugs, gangs, and teen pregnancies are relatively common, you won’t be able to avoid the same influences you’re trying to avoid in public schools. Except now it will be all they know.

IMO exposure to a larger population of people in a public school gives kids more reference for all the kinds of people in society, and control over who they want to interact with. Then it’s the parent’s job to make them feel empowered (not pressured) to make the best choice they have available.

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.

I grew up in a cult that was big on home schooling so they could socially isolate their kids and keep them from getting any influence from outside the cult. It’s good for kids to be exposed to people from different back grounds and who have different opinions. You will never, never, never be able to replicate the interactions and social learning experiences they will have at school, at home. It’s borderline child abuse in my opinion.

Homeschooled kids do things like base their opinions on, “I have heard” instead of citing empirical proof from rigorous sources.