In the 2024-2025 school year, homeschooling continued to grow across the United States, increasing at an average rate of 5.4%. This is nearly three times the pre-pandemic homeschooling growth rate of around 2%. Notably, 36% of reporting states recorded their highest homeschool enrollment numbers ever — exceeding even the peaks reached during the pandemic.
I’m in a dilemma. My kid is nearing school age. My wife already stays at home with the kid. I live in a fairly rural, conservative area. My wife is a former science teacher and we both have masters degrees. I look at the people we live around and wonder, is it going to be a good idea to send my kid to school? Especially because they are already showing advanced capabilities.
I was homeschooled. Its the best! “they need social interaction” yeah, but not necessarily with the retarded kids in public school, sorry… I got plenty enough social interactions. I had friends that went to public school. I played soccer, made friends there. I went to church, had friends there. My parents had friends who had kids I was friends with. I also surfed and liked other sports well enough. There were the neighborhood kids I was friends with, and I lived rural too. I had brother too. Enough about friends.
But yeah, if yall give homeschooling a good try and be committed I believe it is 1000% better than public school. And I think that is both because of education and social education. Some public school kids that I see -especially these days-… its just sad and pitiful… like cant read a clock or read or write cursive? There are so many bad influences too, I know that sounds cliche even, but its true. The wrong friends are worse than the wrong education, sometimes… Oh also both my older brothers are very successful, im a little less successful but still awesome, I make enough and live well. Im also the only one of my brothers that had a drug phase too though. But… im clean now and got shit back together.
Hey my mom also was a science teacher before she became a mom and started homeschooling!
Social interaction is really, really important, right?
I think you aren’t giving other little kids enough credit. They aren’t their parents. I had good friends with awful family cultures, and I’m better for knowing them.
I think you may be judging ‘rural’ neighbors a little harshly, too. And your own kid, especially if they are bright.
…It doesn’t mean you can’t supplement their curriculum though, or advance them. My Dad grew up in a really poor area in the deep, deep south. But he just skipped grades, and didn’t come out as a religious nut or anything, and he didn’t have the benefit of two masters degrees parents.
…I’m bringing this up, because I also knew some homeschooled people, and I feel like it screwed them up. Different situation, but still, the isolation makes me very hesitant.
Once preger u starts injecting their Nazi propaganda and Bible bs into schools kids are better off at home. Don’t let your kids get indoctrinated into the Shitler youth. They will definitely get diddled
One of the fundamental problems of the US: home “schooling”.
This may just be a reflection of a shift in who are having children. The types of families who practice religion and are socially more conservative have more children and they are more likely to homeschool. As the “who” of having children diverges, you are likely to see more homeschooling.
Simple solution. Go ahead and home school. But when the time comes for them to hit voting age, if they can’t pass a GED science test or a civics test, they don’t get to.
Live in your fundamentalist bubble. It’s your right and I don’t give a shit. But your right to swing your fist ends where the rest of our noses begin. Your fundamentalist bubble should have no say over the functioning of a country that is supposed to be built on reason and science.
It’s not just fundies who are homeschooling. A very well-loved (and very liberal) family friend of mine started a home-school co-op for her kids and their neighbors because they were seriously unimpressed with the district test scores in science and social studies. Her kids are intelligent, independent, well-adjusted, and well-read.
She did it because she lived in a red-state and wanted a modern, coherent, first-class education for her kids instead of theocratic indoctrination.
We don’t test people to see if they are eligible to vote. That never ends the way you think it will.
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The Greeks did. The inventors of democracy.
The whole concept of a citizen government relied on what’s called the “Ars Liberalis”; which literally means “the practice of freedom”
The idea being that the prividedge of being a citizen and participating in the democracy came with the expectation that you would be learned in things like civics, history, rhetoric, debate, etc…
The very simple reason for that is because when a person lacks knowledge of a subject, they tend to cede their authority to the first person who tells them something that they were already inclined to believe.
This…the need for stupid pliant voters that would just listen to whatever you say, is directly responsible for the demonization and drastic funding cuts to liberal arts colleges.
That never ends the way you think it does…
I majored in classical archaeology with a minor in history. I’m pretty comfortable in what I “think”, thanks.
So we should be more like a civilization that collapsed 2000 years ago just because they had the idea first? You say you studied history yet gloss right over this fact while also ignoring our own US history with regard to things like “literacy tests?”
Great for you. But we’re not in ancient Greece. Try looking at modern history and the literacy tests that were used to prevent African Americans from voting. Whoever gets to decide what a suitable test for voting rights is gets to decide who can and can’t vote. That’s too much power for anyone to be allowed to weild responsibly.
Is it good or bad? Does it provide a better education while school is unable, or people are just lazy shits and don’t go to school?
Home schooling is most often used by religious extremists to a) prevent the kids from realizing what normal kids do, b) to indoctrinate them, and c) to keep science out of schooling as far as possible.
Sadly, oversight over home schooling is fragile at best, so this produces a new generation of mental incest.
As a former home schooled kid, most of my peers that I home schooled with amounted to little more than breeders.
Real bad once you learn about homeschooling resources.
It’s really all over the place depending on the student, the parents, the homeschooling program they’re using, etc.
I once worked with a guy who homeschooled his kids because their housing situation was a little unstable. It probably provided them a bit of stability they wouldn’t have had otherwise since they probably would have had to change schools a lot with all of the moving around.
Other kids may benefit from it if they’re not doing well in a regular school environment, have disabilities, are gifted, etc.
In other cases it can be very isolating and they miss out on a lot of socialization with other kids their age
And some parents use it to control what their kids are learning to force political or religious agendas on them.
I don’t have a definitive answer for this but I suspect the answer is “it depends”. My brother homeschooled for a number of years because he was very bright scholastically and it worked better for him. I tried it for a year but it didn’t work nearly as well so I went back to regular school.
All that being said, homeschooling can and is used by some hyper religious parents which can have pretty bad consequences for the children.
On average bad, since often a major reason for homeschooling is instilling a greater degree of fundamentalist religious belief while preventing access to a diversity of alternative viewpoints in a classroom setting.
The movie Mean Girls (2004) did a pretty good summary of the different kinds of home-schooled kids in the first few minutes of the movie.
This is great for fascists and nationalists. Get the poor dump ones to be even dumber and poorer while getting those with money and conservative values the support they need from religious/fundamentalist programs.
Perfect recipe of a divided America.
This will be fine… Praise Bwebus 🙏
