It’s fine.

Homeschooling or not isn’t the issue. Plenty of kids who do go to school have a horrible education. I have known some perfect wonderful home schooled people, and some total weirdo religion nut job home schooled people.

The issue is the parents. And there isn’t much you can do about shitty parents unless you remove the child from the home, which is typically only done under the case of severe neglect or abuse. The state doesn’t and shouldn’t have say about how people conduct their private affairs though and how you raise children is very much a private affair.

People say there are parents who do it for good reasons and do a good job, but I haven’t seen that and find it hard to imagine as being common. The person I know who was homeschooled had his life destroyed by his parents, with homeschooling being the first of a series of horrifying blows to his mental state. He doesn’t know the very basics of how society works or anything about math, science, history, or language, but he thinks he knows everything. He seems to think everything taught to kids in school is wrong or unimportant. But his Internet rabbit holes? Invaluable.

Ps he was homeschooled because his parents were religious extremists.

My toddler is thriving in pre-school. We can’t teach her how to be independent and socialise with other kids at home.

I can see a life situation where we would homeschool for a limited time. I’d expect both teaching parent and kid to do standardised testing to make sure the education is up to the national curriculum.

Home schooling should be be an excuse to not school, which it seems to be in some parts of the world.

I was “homeschooled”, along with my many siblings, by Southern Baptist parents. I couldn’t really read until I was 9, and my younger siblings until even later. My older siblings had it marginally better, but not by much.

I was horrendously under-socialiazed, and I still struggle with debilitating social anxiety to this day. Although I should emphasize that a couple of my siblings are very socially competent and relatively well-adjusted, so I’m not sure how much of my issues in that domain are nature vs. nurture.

It always made me feel awful and dumb to hear peers at church talking about school-related things and what subjects they were learning, because I had no idea what they were talking about, which exacerbated my social difficulties. In my teenage years I started to understand what was happening, and I practically had to beg my mother for any kind of instructional material. I taught myself algebra with the help of internet friends. I still distinctly recall how utterly unscientific and creationist-bent was a biology textbook I got; it was so bad that even I was questioning it at the time.

My younger siblings were eventually allowed to participate in a homeschooling “coop” after my younger brother begged for something. Homeschool coops involve homeschool families getting together to have some semi-structured classes, usually something like once a week. Said brother took a “psychology” class there, the textbook for which was written by a guy with a business or economics degree and no background in psychology, and it said mental illness was the result of sin.

Home schooling in my state is ridiculously under-regulated. All you have to do is be registered with a private school as homeschooling and submit transcripts that comply with the state education requirements. That’s literally it. My mother fabricated them - the records say I took Spanish in high school, but I couldn’t have told you much beyond “hola”.

I went to college with what was essentially a fake high school diploma. I languished in my 20’s. I got a master’s degree in my 30’s, but I was lucky and happened to be gifted when it came to academia; most homeschool kids aren’t so fortunate. Most of my siblings have not managed to actualize their potential. I myself could have been doing much more much earlier if I hadn’t gotten a woman pregnant during college because I’d never had anyone tell me to use a condom. In retrospect, my parents’ duress at learning that I was having a child out of wedlock is almost comical for having been essentially self-induced.

I don’t know if homeschooling should be banned outright (as I’m aware of select cases where some parents weren’t neglectful and it was actually a better option for some kids due to various circumstances), but something needs to change. At a minimum, I think homeschoolers should be required to do the same state standardized testing as required in public schools in order to ensure they’re not being outright neglected like I and my siblings were.

My child is attending public school, which has had it’s own set of issues (bullying and a shocking amount of violence, for starters), but it’s a marvel to me the gap between what she knows and what I knew at her age. She’s learning things that I still haven’t. She’s better off for it.

Tl;Dr: don’t homeschool, do improve public school.

I think home schooling (and private schools) should be illegal. Everyone’s kids should have to go through the same public education system. No exceptions. Public schools could use an influx of cash, and there are definitely edge cases that they don’t handle well currently. We should advocate for making them better rather than finding an alternative.

Every homeschooled person I’ve met has lacked all tact but YMMV. I haven’t met anyone that was homschooled after leaving university so no clue if that improves over time.

The majority that defend homeschooling do so on pure ideological grounds. They accuse schools of indoctrinating kids, but they want to personally ensure their kids are indoctrinated the way they (the parents) deem correct. “Sex is evil! Women should submit to men! <Ethnicity> is pure evil! Never question me!” - these parents should NEVER homeschool their kids.

There are very few situations where homeschooling would be better for the kid over traditional schooling, and those situations are usually remedied with the school getting its shit together and being at least decent.

The school can’t always get better though and can even be harmful to kids, due to bad teachers, bad staff, bad classmates or general precarious conditions, especially if the kid has any sort of special need (autism, down’s syndrome, etc). Changing schools isn’t always an option, whether due to distance or cost of moving back and forth every day, and that’s usually when homeschooling should be done.

Actually not too bad. I wasn’t fully homeschooled, however, my old man augmented what school was teaching me. Basically he taught me mathematics, reading and writing. It kept me well ahead of my class. I had a good handle on fractions and so on at about grade two.

Then again, my old man was a physicist with a PhD.

I think it’s a shitty thing to do long term unless your child has disabilities (in which case a school accomodating them is better).

Send your kid where they choose to go, it’ll probably be school where their friends are.

I, already being pretty awkward as a child, cannot imagine trying to unlearn awkwardness after suddenly changing to public schooling. Might even have the opposite problem, showing too much energy when interacting with people i don’t know well.

Definitely DEFINITELY don’t do it for primary (elementary) school age.

I think it’s a big mistake, but don’t think ‘the law’ should get involved, either.

Include meals, that’s a good incentive and will help a lot of kids that are fed total garbage at home.

if we can’t feed children what are we even doing?

Big part of school is training on how to be socialized into society. Interact with people who are different than you. Homeschooling provides none of that.

Wonderful day!

And again… I am sorry, but why not just read about it, like… professional researches from both modern and ancient times, existing centuries… Why ask people to invest their priceless finite life time to, again, respond with a yet another set of written messages for the case of multiple investigations/analyses around the planet?
It’s an incredibly responsible question for the parents/supervisors, and there are serious researches done for it. The answer affects the whole future of the child/person they will depend on all their ongoing life… and, hopefully, their own children…

A school is not a home, in general, I believe. One of main the main reason a school is exists is - socialization. That is, gaining skills of creating social connections, learn to educate yourself and deal with interruptions and distractions in social environments with so different people, worldviews, and beliefs, in attempt to find yourself and your own identity alongside other people.

Since isn’t the most important reason for these to help a person to socialize and get used to crowded or accompanied environments, to respect, care, tolerate, or live and do their research within other ultimately infinitely magnificent unique people?

It’s for the parents/family to decide, since every single child/person is different.
I do normally stand against “homeschooling” (“wetdrying”) and push towards a socialized organization like University, School, Kindergarten etc.

The following is an excerpt from earlier discussions I’ve just found in personal notes:

Socialization process has a significant impact on learning, which is a basic requirement for both the organization and the role performance of the newcomer to the organization. It is considered very important for a new member to socialize organizationally and professionally. This paper focuses on revealing the process of organizational and professional socialization of academicians.

Source

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Friendships can positively impact students’ academic performance and grade point average (GPA) by providing emotional support and reducing stress, thereby leading to improved focus and better concentration on studies.

Peer connections and friendships often result in collaborative learning and the exchange of academic ideas, improving comprehension and retention of course materials, ultimately leading to higher GPAs…

Academic success is assessed by gauging academic performance in the form of grade point average (GPA), test scores, and overall academic achievement, as well as the measurement of academic motivation and the level of persistence among students in school or college.

Forming friendships with their peers is an important aspect of adolescents’ and young adults’ lives, and significant research has been conducted on how friends impact academic performance and motivation. Specifically, academic achievement and motivation have been found to positively correlate with belonging to a peer group.

Currently, young people’s need for a sense of community is particularly high, leading individuals to spend more time with their friends, feel more comfortable around friends than they do with family, and worry about how their friends will perceive them and how the local social milieu will view them.

Researchers’ concerns about how social networking sites affect different aspects of life, including education, are not surprising. Academic achievement has been linked favorably to social connections or peer interactions in the past.

Source

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Of course, in a large population, there are going to be some success stories. But we have zero evidence that, on average, homeschooled students are doing well. There’s actually no way to learn how they do on average because homeschoolers don’t exist as a visible population due to the lack of regulation.

There are claims being made in what is really junk social science that homeschooled students do just as well as kids in regular schools. But there is no justification for those claims. People making those claims are looking at a subset of the most successful homeschooled students.

They’re looking at the ones who actually apply to college and go to college, and are assessing how they do in college compared to kids coming from public schools. Those studies tell us nothing about how well homeschoolers do on average.

Source: Harvard

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Most of the time when I overheard these women talking about their educational choice, and why they were doing it, the reasons seemed to have one thing in common.

Can you guess what it was? Fear.

Source

Related: Why homeschooling is bad for kids (Debunking the myths…)

It works best as an addition to, rather than replacement for, public schooling.

Depends heavily on the parents. I had a few cousins who were home schooled for primary school so up until 10yr and they were 100% different to interact with and at the time I thought they were nerdy. But looking back it was because they were better socially developed and more mature than my friends and I. They were far more polite to kids (we were all polite to adults), smarter on topics we learnt in school (they didnt know about stuff like fighting and stealing from the local dairy and couldnt even ride a bike or swim) and more empathetic because they spent most of their time interacting with adults who’d correct bad behaviors while my friends and I would be socializing with kids unsupervised for most of the day.

But we all turned out fine and had good upbringings.

It is illegal here, parents are required to send their children to school for a minimum of nine years.

This is to protect the interests of the child, Sweden has several laws that are focused on the child’s rights over the parent’s authority.

I have read arguments from people in the US who homeschool their kids about how it is the parent’s right to manage their children’s education.

But to me that just seems wrong, in Sweden children have the right to a high quality education that follows a proper plan and is done by professional teachers, it is the duty of the parents to make sure the children attends their education.

Homeschooling means that the government can’t verify that the education the children receive is up to standards set by the department of education.

Just about all education in Sweden is free to Swedes and EU citizens, so there is zero financial reason to do homeschooling over regular schooling here.