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.

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.