So, let me explain where I come from, on schooling.I would love to hear peoples opinion on home schooling.
It is a very American thing, and where I come from if you don't send your kids to school you go to jail and your kids go into foster care.
I get that it is a personal choice here, and know plenty of people who have home schooled, and the reasons varied from "I wanted to because it would be fun for me", to "I can give them a better education than public school", to "I don't want my kids exposed to evil ideas that others may have I cannot control". These latter were usually extremely religious people. Also "it is easier to keep them at home than having to get my kids to school and back every day". I get that there are bad schools, but the people I know who homeschool have excellent local schools and it is nothing to do with that.
2 people I work with have super smart well educated spouses (one went to Stanford, and another to MIT) so you may think they are suitable parents to teach their kids everything. But are they? What is taught in school has changed so much with technology and science over the last 20 years. I know there are on-line resources to help home schoolers, but why not just go to school and "top up" at home?
How can 1 (or 2) parents replace 3 whole schools worth of modern teaching experience and know even a fraction of what they collectively know?
Also at school you learn to interact in a normal way with other people, and learn about boundaries and deadlines, so when you go to university (or work) you have some life experience and don't go completely off the rails.
First, being autistic, I was shoveled around from one special ed class, to another. I never actually did a regular education in class. I'm sure there's areas where I lack, a lot. (Like math.) that I never got good at, because of not having a formal education. Everything I do know, I taught myself, from reading books, using the internet, watching videos, and learning from doing, observation, etc.
The fact that I could walk out of special ed schooling, with no actual class work being done, and get my GED, test, and place for college, and put myself into college when I was 18/19 years old, says a lot to me about the expectations of education, and that you don't need a formal classroom setting to learn enough to survive in life.
Now, while I may be in the minority on being able to pass tests, or retain information, I also dealt with a lot of bullying in school, including but not limited to both physical and sexual bullying along with emotional and verbal abuse. Not just by students, but by teachers, as well.
Now, when my oldest was little, I tried to homeschool him for kindergarten. He didn't cooperate with me, so I gave up and put him in public school. Figured I wasn't cut out for it, and something was wrong with me, as a teacher.
Turns out, he's special needs, too. It turned into one phone call after another from the teachers, principals, etc Lots of epic meltdowns, behavioral problems, and issues at school socially that required constant fighting from us.
I.e. his teacher wouldn't even try to get him to do classwork. She'd send home a folder, and expect us to do an entire weeks worth of work while home, over the weekend, and on the evenings after school each day. We never had a life, and we'd spend from the time he got home, until bed in the morning, fighting with him to get him caught up.
It wasn't fair to him, us, or his sister. Eventually, after a couple years of this, we gave up, and took him out of public school again and started homeschooling him. We got him formally diagnosed, tested, and on the right path. With his particular diagnoses, him being in public school puts himself at risk for manipulation, the target of bullying, and him hurting others potentially.
It's safest for my oldest to be at home.
With my younger kids, it depends entirely on their preferences. I live in a place where teachers recently got arrested for drug trafficking and distribution. I don't particularly want ANY of my kids exposed to people who are supposed to be in trusted positions, who would do that.
We go to church (but I am not overly religious, and despite living in Texas, I grew up in WA state, where I was exposed to diverse cultures... I actually struggle with the anti-gayness part of the religions where I live because a lot of my friends were gay and transgender before I moved here.)
Back to the schooling portion of it though - we do Co-op classes. (this semester, it's anatomy.) We go to social groups, and we arrange play dates, on top of 4h and other projects were doing. We focus more on family, doing things as a family, (because I feel that's important.) and making sure we balance education separately from "friends", I feel learning how the real world works around them, is incredibly important. I feel like kids don't learn how to write checks, pay bills, balance mental math sheets in their head when buying groceries. I feel that they fail to teach life skills in school, but they pile on so much work and homework, kids don't have time for recreational activities along with all the demands of school.
If my youngest was in public school, she wouldn't have time for all her animals, or her friends the way she does now.
I've never been in a situation, that felt like public school, since being out of school. While you do run into your occasional jerk's as adults, no one sits there, and pulls you up to the front and publicly humiliates you for misunderstanding a writing assignment in front of everyone else.
Your boss could get sued if they treated you the way a lot of kids get treated in the public school system. I want my kids to learn to be accepting, patient and kind to others. I also don't want them to put up with being mistreated. Even from each other.. (I don't allow my kids to be mean to each other, either.)
Then, there's the problem with too many kids per teacher, not enough individual attention to motivate their success in learning. So many kids get pushed through, without truly understanding what they were taught, and by the time anyone realizes, they are often too far behind to catch up in a regular classroom setting without holding everyone else up. Or, they get the material too easy and often become a distraction to the other students because of being bored. They cater to the middle, and the two extreme opposites in the classroom, suffer for it.
Also, the new way they are teaching math is stupid. LOL
I'm a fan of a diverse education and want my kids to be exposed to a lot of different ideas, cultures, and beliefs, and I feel that they are limited in a public school environment because of too many PC rules.
Also, I feel that its important to use a child's interests, to help motivate them to learn and keep their passion for learning thriving. They can't have a flexible, and individualized education geared at a person's skills and interests in a mainstream setting. This often makes it so a kid won't do as well, because they struggle to do things designed for an average person and not an individual.
There's plenty of time as an adult to conform, blend in, but I really like cultivating innovating thinking. I could write a lot more, but the thing is, I'm not anti public school. I just don't feel it's a good fit for us, and we luckily live in a place where we have a lot of homeschooling families to go on field trips with and plan social play dates for our kids. Including in big groups!
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