Here's the thing about homeschooling that I think non-homeschooled kids don't and can't understand. You can have the best parents on the planet with the best intentions on the planet and homeschool will still seriously fuck you up. There is no way to do it ethically. I know because I basically had the best possible homeschooling experience.
My parents pulled me for the fourth grade, and I was homeschooled until the end of high school. Nine entire years. They pulled me from the public schools for a perfectly reasonable reason — my mental health was in the toilet and I needed to be away from other kids who might hurt me as they had spent all of my third grade year doing. My mom has a fucking PhD in neuroscience and tutors math professionally. She was, during the ten years that my siblings and I were homeschooled, the best, kindest, most caring, understanding, lovely teacher you could ask for.
But I'm still broken. That's the thing about homeschool. You can have the best experience possible in homeschool and still come out a fundamentally broken person. My social development stopped at the age of 10. I'm a 22 year old adult woman with the social skills of a 10 year old. That's not to say that that COULDN'T have happened in public school, but being homeschooled only made it more of a certainty. Both of my siblings and I have fewer coping strategies on average than our peers with similar neurodivergencies because we basically did not live in the real world for a decade during key developmental years.
Don't ban homeschooling because of the religious nuts. There are plenty of them. Hell, I KNEW plenty of them. But there are also plenty of quote unquote "good" homeschool families. Ones that do everything you would hope the model homeschool family does. And they are still hurting their children, even if unintentionally, because homeschooling is an inhrently traumatic experience. It's isolating. For seven entire years of my life, I had no friends. Not because I was a social outcast, but because I didn't even SEE anybody regularly enough. But, nonetheless, I knew people. You generally do if you get involved in the community.
Ban homeschooling because it breaks and utterly destroys everyone who goes through it.
Everyone.
I'm sorry, Lauren. I'm sorry, Kade. I'm sorry to the boy whose name I can no longer remember. I'm sorry that I survived and you didn't.
Homeschooling was probably the best possible way for me to get educated, given my particularly blend of neurodivergence: It still messed me up terribly bad, and I was one of the luckiest ones. For most kids it was far, far worse.
I agree 100%
For me, getting homeschooled right after 4th grade was because 1) I got constantly sick to the point of missing too much school anyway, 2) this school had mean as hell teachers and 3) I just hated it. It was torture to me. I hated everything about it and still look back on it as 100% pure misery. I was honestly shocked to hear that some kids don't mind or even actually like school.
And I had a great time. I love that I skipped years and years more of child prison and I'm sure I'd have been one of the ostracized kids if I'd gone to high school, I was just too awkward and odd. Terrible adhd. Everyone there would have hated me.
Anyway I think homeschooling should be banned but public schooling should only take half as much time out of a kid's life and de-emphasize the "baby cubicle farm" "sit and listen" approach.
