Homeschooling hits record numbers

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.

> 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.