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Homeschooling seems like an ideal solution for those with a parent at home to improve their children's academic learning. But it's concerning that those activel

by jaden 7y ago

Homeschooling seems like an ideal solution for those with a parent at home to improve their children's academic learning. But it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system.

inetknght 7y ago
> it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system. As someone who was homeschooled: it's extremely scary. I've missed out on social experiences and also on actual education and consider myself generally worse-off for it. Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. How many homeschooling families are also anti-vaxxers or feed into anti-government paranoia? Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for.
- GuiA 7y ago
  I can read your comment in several, slightly conflicting, ways: - homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest - homeschooling is at a systemic disadvantage because parents that care enough about their kid's education to take an active part in it have no voice in the public schooling system (my understanding of grandparent's point); in addition, they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it. Am I misunderstanding?
  - jf 7y ago
    As someone who was exclusively homeschooled (and glad of it) my read is mostly of the first interpretation: OP likely had authoritarian parents that used homeschooling as a method of control rather than a way to learn.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    > homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest I am not saying that homeschooling in practice is mostly undesirable. Instead, there can be undesirable elements to it. And those undesirable elements are neither common nor easy to spot. Nor am I saying that it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who aren't going to act in their child's best interest. I certainly think there's an element of truth to it but don't think it's overwhelmingly the case. My parents did have legitimate reasons to homeschool some of the family. But I think the legitimate issues were leveraged for, indeed, control. Then: I think they bit off more than they could chew (I have a big family); I don't think they realized just how much effort they volunteered of themselves. At the end of a year, they chose to dig their heels in and continue a broken implementation of homeschool and not addressing the problems that came up, instead of risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades and having to answer to the State. > they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it. Yes. Maybe not everywhere but it certainly seemed to be the case when I was in California until moved '03.
    - souprock 7y ago
      I certainly know what you mean about "big family" (have 11 so far) and "just how much effort they volunteered of themselves" and "risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades" due to uneven progress. The out is dual-enrollment, sometimes called running start or concurrent enrollment. In many locations it is free, leading to an AA degree. Because it is scheduled in the style of normal college, with classes chosen as you please, uneven progress is not a problem. Consider also that the students bear some responsibility and can easily have disasters in public school. If the students choose to dig their heels in, refusing to study, that simply shuts down any kind of education. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Be careful about assuming your parents did worse than a public school would have done, even if things went badly. Some kids just refuse to learn.
  - watwut 7y ago
    > - homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest To large extend, homeschooling movement was to large extend motivated politically and does attract fringe groups who want to avoid mainstream society. Avoidance of exposure of certain parts of history or sex ed or gender relationships or culture is strong motivation for many of those families. It did not became popular in conservative christian male is head of household types randomly.
- negzero7 7y ago
  I was also home schooled (4th and 5th grade) and it wasn't scary. I missed out on some social opportunities but I joined clubs and played sports to make up for those interactions. Homeschooling put me far ahead of my peers. I went back for middle school (6th grade) and skated through the next 3 years until I could take AP classes in high school. I am by no means exceptional nor were my parents great teachers. I think being able to go at my own pace allowed me to learn faster and more thoroughly than if I had been in a classroom. I'd say there are a lot of upsides to home schooling if parents can swing it, and the downsides can be mitigated by a little extra effort on socializing.
  - mathattack 7y ago
    There’s a ton of upside from 1 on 1 parental attention. Schools only get a few hours of real education time daily. A sharp parent can clear that in an hour or so. Give 3 hours 1 on 1 and the Gap grows even more.
- rogerkirkness 7y ago
  I was homeschooled, and I learned way more way faster, your counter argument only applies to people too crazy for school as opposed to too smart. It's immediately clear when you meet people who are too crazy for school and who are too intense / smart.
- rayiner 7y ago
  What social experiences do you feel like you missed out on? Having teachers ignore you and spend 90% of their time dealing with problem kids? The petty drama? How many people look back fondly on K-12 and think “man, that was great?” Read Sasse’s “the vanishing American adult.” It’s got some great commentary on what’s wrong with modern school. We take kids, and instead of having them be around adults to socialize them, we let them loose on their own little child-dominated Lord of the Flies society.
  - paulgb 7y ago
    Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children.
    - harryh 7y ago
      Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. I am not at all convinced that this is true. See: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
    - camelNotation 7y ago
      > Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. There's really no evidence for this. The only reason anyone believes this is because modern school is a living hell and if the suffering and misery doesn't serve some practical purpose, we'd all be depressed. The truth is that there are plenty of people who are schooled privately that turn out just fine.
    - asark 7y ago
      > I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children. It certainly is, the book even beats you over the head with it when (spoiler warning I guess?) the warship shows up to rescue them at the end. I do think the K-12 school doesn't particularly resemble adult life, and is a lot worse in most ways. For one thing, leaving bad situations isn't really an option, while at the same time anti-social behavior is more tolerated. Meanwhile you're doing a bunch of work on things that are quickly round-filed when you're done with them, year after year, and operating under a system that's strangely strict and dehumanizing considering how much shittiness it allows to go on. And I had a pretty good school experience, so this isn't coming from some place of special bitterness.
- camelNotation 7y ago
  I don't think this is a problem with homeschooling as much as with a subset of homeschoolers - particularly religious fundamentalists and anarchist types. My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject. She had a teaching license up until a couple of years ago (they do expire after a while) and taught for several years before we had kids. Then, once they arrived, she decided this was a natural fit. Meanwhile, they're also plugged in with a local co-op with more than thirty kids that they meet up with several times a week. Homeschooling can be used to keep kids out of the system and deny them a good education, but it can also be the platform for an elite education like no other. There's a reason the wealthiest families in American pay for private tutors and elite schools with tiny class sizes. Nothing beats one on one from a capable instructor. As my kids grow older, they'll get one-on-one training in the arts, foreign language, and various extra-curricular skills like swimming, dance, etc. from instructors that we hire to assist them. They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school. Honestly, if there is anything wrong with homeschooling itself, it's that it is only available to middle and upper class families.
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    > They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school. Except for those whose parents also hire expert tutors. It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities. When you consider how much homeschooling is by parents who are not themselves professional educators, I suspect a hybrid approach works better on average.
    - camelNotation 7y ago
      Professional educators really only need the training and certification because they are dealing with students at scale. One on one teaching is not remotely the same as teaching in a classroom setting where you have to adapt to multiple learning styles and multiple achievement levels all while using standardized assessment techniques, detailed lesson planning, and classroom management skills. The vast majority of what composes an education degree is there because you are educating a large, diverse group. When it is just one teacher working one on one with a single student, a lot of that is irrelevant. The way you teach, the way you assess their progress, and the way you adapt to their needs is much more natural. And most of the principles that apply in both contexts can be learned on the fly. > It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities. This is true and it's a lot of why we homeschool. There are peers that are getting similarly elite educations and just doing it slightly different ways. If I had a billion dollars, I would be paying for an elite, personal tutor to educate my children. I wouldn't be sending them to a public school. Homeschooling allows my wife and I to provide something analogous to that elite structure for our children, even though they are firmly middle class.
- OrangeMango 7y ago
  > Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. My children are homeschooled in a major metro area not in Texas. We also have effectively zero oversight. But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has. I understand that in rural areas this can mean that such children have all but disappeared from view, but where we live the school districts allow homeschool children to participate in afterschool activities (including competitive sports) and a recent change in state law allows for homeschool children to attend a class or two at the local school and then leave for the day, if that is something a parent wants. The park district offers many sports classes in the middle of the day for homeschool kids, forest preserves and state parks offer nature classes, and museums have science and art courses. Private businesses love us, they offer discounts to fill up time slots that would otherwise go empty. The public library is very welcoming and typically allows use of community rooms for free. A public school classroom with 30+ children in it simply doesn't have the time to offer as much educational opportunity that our children get in half the time, allowing them so much time during the day for play, imagination, and reading or exploring topics of their own choice (we typically have 30-60 library books at home at any one point in time).
  - pryce 7y ago
    > But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has. I don't think the question of 'whether oversight is a good idea' is usefully explored by piecemeal examples where everything went fine and the motivation of parents is genuine "interest in the success of our children". This is not to say there is anything particularly wrong with homeschooling per se, I wouldn't accept that examining piecemeal cases where everything went fine would be a good way of inferring "whether oversight is a good idea" in the case of a church or business or academic institution either.
- eadmund 7y ago
  > Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for. That's also, of course, true of those who send their kids to private school. I think that there's an excellent argument for vouchers which enable parents to allocate the funds that would have gone to a public school to a private school. There are some dangers (because once something is private, it can be advertised and the system can be gamed), but overall I think this is far better than our current 51%-of-parents-decide model. I don't feel that it'd be a good idea to give homeschooling parents a similar voucher, but only because it's too ripe for abuse: an abusive parent could take the voucher and spend it, and not bother to educate his kids. I don't know how likely it is, but it's worrisome nonetheless.
  - souprock 7y ago
    I could really use a voucher for homeschooling. I've spent a lot on books, calculators, and even paper. (11 kids) I think I spent about $1000 to do chemistry labs. With the voucher I probably would have added a condenser, nickel crucibles, a kiln, an extra digit on my balance, decent-sized platinum electrodes, and a spectrophotometer. Make it a big voucher and I'll get an electron microscope, an extreme-ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscope, and a DNA sequencer.
the_watcher 7y ago
Many of the most actively involved parents are already removing themselves (and their children) from the public school system, as the payoff to fighting for improvement won't come until after it can benefit their kids. I don't think it's exactly a tragedy of the commons situation, more of the inverse, but the costs (to the parent) are so high that it's hard to blame them. Personally, I think the best we can hope for is that models like Outschool can develop into supplements that work in concert with public school, reducing the relative ROI of going private.
tathougies 7y ago
The children of actively involved parents now have children themselves. They saw the futility of their actively involved parents actions, and how the school system wore them down and slowed down their growth, and want nothing to do with it.
up_and_up 7y ago
We have homeschool friends who felt the same and tried to get involved with the public school system. They are very civic minded etc. They found the red tape crushing for their kid, who is a bit of genius, plus he was getting beat up etc. Obviously this is anecdotal. They pulled him and now he is winning academic competitions (history, geography) like 3 grade levels above his age. He reads war history for hours and hours.
20years 7y ago
Why is this concerning? The public school system has a lot of issues. My son went to public school until 6th grade and I about pulled my hair out with issue after issue. We put him in a hybrid charter school program (3 days homeschool, 2 days in class) for 7th and 8th and started my youngest in this same program from kindergarten. Both are well ahead academically of their peers and grade level. There are a ton of homeschool groups in our area too that organize activities where all of the kids get together. It is very active giving kids plenty of opportunity to socialize. We don't homeschool for religious reasons. We do it because we want our kids to get the best possible education without all of the indoctrination and other crap that is pushed through the public education system. This is pretty much the reason most of the other homeschoolers that I engage with do it too. I think homeschooling has a bad rap because of the media and a few bad apples but at least from my experience, that portrayal is not the norm.

by jaden 7y ago

inetknght 7y ago

> it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system. As someone who was homeschooled: it's extremely scary. I've missed out on social experiences and also on actual education and consider myself generally worse-off for it. Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. How many homeschooling families are also anti-vaxxers or feed into anti-government paranoia? Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for.

GuiA 7y ago
I can read your comment in several, slightly conflicting, ways: - homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest - homeschooling is at a systemic disadvantage because parents that care enough about their kid's education to take an active part in it have no voice in the public schooling system (my understanding of grandparent's point); in addition, they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it. Am I misunderstanding?
- jf 7y ago
  As someone who was exclusively homeschooled (and glad of it) my read is mostly of the first interpretation: OP likely had authoritarian parents that used homeschooling as a method of control rather than a way to learn.
- inetknght 7y ago
  > homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest I am not saying that homeschooling in practice is mostly undesirable. Instead, there can be undesirable elements to it. And those undesirable elements are neither common nor easy to spot. Nor am I saying that it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who aren't going to act in their child's best interest. I certainly think there's an element of truth to it but don't think it's overwhelmingly the case. My parents did have legitimate reasons to homeschool some of the family. But I think the legitimate issues were leveraged for, indeed, control. Then: I think they bit off more than they could chew (I have a big family); I don't think they realized just how much effort they volunteered of themselves. At the end of a year, they chose to dig their heels in and continue a broken implementation of homeschool and not addressing the problems that came up, instead of risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades and having to answer to the State. > they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it. Yes. Maybe not everywhere but it certainly seemed to be the case when I was in California until moved '03.
  - souprock 7y ago
    I certainly know what you mean about "big family" (have 11 so far) and "just how much effort they volunteered of themselves" and "risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades" due to uneven progress. The out is dual-enrollment, sometimes called running start or concurrent enrollment. In many locations it is free, leading to an AA degree. Because it is scheduled in the style of normal college, with classes chosen as you please, uneven progress is not a problem. Consider also that the students bear some responsibility and can easily have disasters in public school. If the students choose to dig their heels in, refusing to study, that simply shuts down any kind of education. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Be careful about assuming your parents did worse than a public school would have done, even if things went badly. Some kids just refuse to learn.
- watwut 7y ago
  > - homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest To large extend, homeschooling movement was to large extend motivated politically and does attract fringe groups who want to avoid mainstream society. Avoidance of exposure of certain parts of history or sex ed or gender relationships or culture is strong motivation for many of those families. It did not became popular in conservative christian male is head of household types randomly.
negzero7 7y ago
I was also home schooled (4th and 5th grade) and it wasn't scary. I missed out on some social opportunities but I joined clubs and played sports to make up for those interactions. Homeschooling put me far ahead of my peers. I went back for middle school (6th grade) and skated through the next 3 years until I could take AP classes in high school. I am by no means exceptional nor were my parents great teachers. I think being able to go at my own pace allowed me to learn faster and more thoroughly than if I had been in a classroom. I'd say there are a lot of upsides to home schooling if parents can swing it, and the downsides can be mitigated by a little extra effort on socializing.
- mathattack 7y ago
  There’s a ton of upside from 1 on 1 parental attention. Schools only get a few hours of real education time daily. A sharp parent can clear that in an hour or so. Give 3 hours 1 on 1 and the Gap grows even more.
rogerkirkness 7y ago
I was homeschooled, and I learned way more way faster, your counter argument only applies to people too crazy for school as opposed to too smart. It's immediately clear when you meet people who are too crazy for school and who are too intense / smart.
rayiner 7y ago
What social experiences do you feel like you missed out on? Having teachers ignore you and spend 90% of their time dealing with problem kids? The petty drama? How many people look back fondly on K-12 and think “man, that was great?” Read Sasse’s “the vanishing American adult.” It’s got some great commentary on what’s wrong with modern school. We take kids, and instead of having them be around adults to socialize them, we let them loose on their own little child-dominated Lord of the Flies society.
- paulgb 7y ago
  Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children.
  - harryh 7y ago
    Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. I am not at all convinced that this is true. See: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
  - camelNotation 7y ago
    > Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. There's really no evidence for this. The only reason anyone believes this is because modern school is a living hell and if the suffering and misery doesn't serve some practical purpose, we'd all be depressed. The truth is that there are plenty of people who are schooled privately that turn out just fine.
  - asark 7y ago
    > I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children. It certainly is, the book even beats you over the head with it when (spoiler warning I guess?) the warship shows up to rescue them at the end. I do think the K-12 school doesn't particularly resemble adult life, and is a lot worse in most ways. For one thing, leaving bad situations isn't really an option, while at the same time anti-social behavior is more tolerated. Meanwhile you're doing a bunch of work on things that are quickly round-filed when you're done with them, year after year, and operating under a system that's strangely strict and dehumanizing considering how much shittiness it allows to go on. And I had a pretty good school experience, so this isn't coming from some place of special bitterness.
camelNotation 7y ago
I don't think this is a problem with homeschooling as much as with a subset of homeschoolers - particularly religious fundamentalists and anarchist types. My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject. She had a teaching license up until a couple of years ago (they do expire after a while) and taught for several years before we had kids. Then, once they arrived, she decided this was a natural fit. Meanwhile, they're also plugged in with a local co-op with more than thirty kids that they meet up with several times a week. Homeschooling can be used to keep kids out of the system and deny them a good education, but it can also be the platform for an elite education like no other. There's a reason the wealthiest families in American pay for private tutors and elite schools with tiny class sizes. Nothing beats one on one from a capable instructor. As my kids grow older, they'll get one-on-one training in the arts, foreign language, and various extra-curricular skills like swimming, dance, etc. from instructors that we hire to assist them. They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school. Honestly, if there is anything wrong with homeschooling itself, it's that it is only available to middle and upper class families.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  > They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school. Except for those whose parents also hire expert tutors. It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities. When you consider how much homeschooling is by parents who are not themselves professional educators, I suspect a hybrid approach works better on average.
  - camelNotation 7y ago
    Professional educators really only need the training and certification because they are dealing with students at scale. One on one teaching is not remotely the same as teaching in a classroom setting where you have to adapt to multiple learning styles and multiple achievement levels all while using standardized assessment techniques, detailed lesson planning, and classroom management skills. The vast majority of what composes an education degree is there because you are educating a large, diverse group. When it is just one teacher working one on one with a single student, a lot of that is irrelevant. The way you teach, the way you assess their progress, and the way you adapt to their needs is much more natural. And most of the principles that apply in both contexts can be learned on the fly. > It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities. This is true and it's a lot of why we homeschool. There are peers that are getting similarly elite educations and just doing it slightly different ways. If I had a billion dollars, I would be paying for an elite, personal tutor to educate my children. I wouldn't be sending them to a public school. Homeschooling allows my wife and I to provide something analogous to that elite structure for our children, even though they are firmly middle class.
OrangeMango 7y ago
> Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. My children are homeschooled in a major metro area not in Texas. We also have effectively zero oversight. But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has. I understand that in rural areas this can mean that such children have all but disappeared from view, but where we live the school districts allow homeschool children to participate in afterschool activities (including competitive sports) and a recent change in state law allows for homeschool children to attend a class or two at the local school and then leave for the day, if that is something a parent wants. The park district offers many sports classes in the middle of the day for homeschool kids, forest preserves and state parks offer nature classes, and museums have science and art courses. Private businesses love us, they offer discounts to fill up time slots that would otherwise go empty. The public library is very welcoming and typically allows use of community rooms for free. A public school classroom with 30+ children in it simply doesn't have the time to offer as much educational opportunity that our children get in half the time, allowing them so much time during the day for play, imagination, and reading or exploring topics of their own choice (we typically have 30-60 library books at home at any one point in time).
- pryce 7y ago
  > But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has. I don't think the question of 'whether oversight is a good idea' is usefully explored by piecemeal examples where everything went fine and the motivation of parents is genuine "interest in the success of our children". This is not to say there is anything particularly wrong with homeschooling per se, I wouldn't accept that examining piecemeal cases where everything went fine would be a good way of inferring "whether oversight is a good idea" in the case of a church or business or academic institution either.
eadmund 7y ago
> Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for. That's also, of course, true of those who send their kids to private school. I think that there's an excellent argument for vouchers which enable parents to allocate the funds that would have gone to a public school to a private school. There are some dangers (because once something is private, it can be advertised and the system can be gamed), but overall I think this is far better than our current 51%-of-parents-decide model. I don't feel that it'd be a good idea to give homeschooling parents a similar voucher, but only because it's too ripe for abuse: an abusive parent could take the voucher and spend it, and not bother to educate his kids. I don't know how likely it is, but it's worrisome nonetheless.
- souprock 7y ago
  I could really use a voucher for homeschooling. I've spent a lot on books, calculators, and even paper. (11 kids) I think I spent about $1000 to do chemistry labs. With the voucher I probably would have added a condenser, nickel crucibles, a kiln, an extra digit on my balance, decent-sized platinum electrodes, and a spectrophotometer. Make it a big voucher and I'll get an electron microscope, an extreme-ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscope, and a DNA sequencer.

the_watcher 7y ago

Many of the most actively involved parents are already removing themselves (and their children) from the public school system, as the payoff to fighting for improvement won't come until after it can benefit their kids. I don't think it's exactly a tragedy of the commons situation, more of the inverse, but the costs (to the parent) are so high that it's hard to blame them. Personally, I think the best we can hope for is that models like Outschool can develop into supplements that work in concert with public school, reducing the relative ROI of going private.

tathougies 7y ago

The children of actively involved parents now have children themselves. They saw the futility of their actively involved parents actions, and how the school system wore them down and slowed down their growth, and want nothing to do with it.

up_and_up 7y ago

We have homeschool friends who felt the same and tried to get involved with the public school system. They are very civic minded etc. They found the red tape crushing for their kid, who is a bit of genius, plus he was getting beat up etc. Obviously this is anecdotal. They pulled him and now he is winning academic competitions (history, geography) like 3 grade levels above his age. He reads war history for hours and hours.

20years 7y ago

Why is this concerning? The public school system has a lot of issues. My son went to public school until 6th grade and I about pulled my hair out with issue after issue. We put him in a hybrid charter school program (3 days homeschool, 2 days in class) for 7th and 8th and started my youngest in this same program from kindergarten. Both are well ahead academically of their peers and grade level. There are a ton of homeschool groups in our area too that organize activities where all of the kids get together. It is very active giving kids plenty of opportunity to socialize. We don't homeschool for religious reasons. We do it because we want our kids to get the best possible education without all of the indoctrination and other crap that is pushed through the public education system. This is pretty much the reason most of the other homeschoolers that I engage with do it too. I think homeschooling has a bad rap because of the media and a few bad apples but at least from my experience, that portrayal is not the norm.