“Think you can provide more resources and well thought out and efficiently applied curriculum than a centuries old and constantly corrected product of society that draws on every corner of society and hundreds of lifelong full-time employees whose entire lives revolve around hopefully improving society and giving the confident, respectful, and considerate qualities to children? That system isn’t perfect and is compromise and resource-short hell… Why not give it a REAL half-assing and short-change your kids EVEN WORSE!”

Homeschooling is rarely successful and deprives children of the chance to socialize and practice it. As well a lot of the people who do it use it as a method of indoctrination for religious reasons.

It’s hubris and/or abuse, and should be illegal barring exceptional circumstances.

Public schools should be well funded.

Private schools should also be illegal.

If there is one thing going to highschool in Texas taught me it’s that Germany was communist during WW2.

Well, also that it may be good if you have time to NOT neglect the child and can get mentors/tutors to help them.

But even then they have to go to school at some point to learn socializing, no?

Unless you’re an expert on child development and education, then you’re not qualified.

I lived in an area with bad schools for about 4 years. I spent time in public school and a number of church schools. Religion fucked me up pretty good, but at least my parents weren’t crazy religious nuts, so I at least got to come home to some normalcy. I didn’t meet a lot of home school kids until way later. I have met several that are brilliantly well adjusted human beings, who were non-religious homeschoolers who were doing it for other reasons. I’ve met other people who think water boils because god wills it and sickness is caused by demons latching onto your unconfessed sins.

I’m generally against it in most circumstances, but I do think it depends largely on the intention of the parents. If we had better public schools, I think the amount of homeschoolers would naturally drop quite a bit.

I went to school where I live and it was abysmal. My oldest 2 I homeschooled for a few years, eventually found a good school they could go to. Those 2 had a much better attitude towards school than the later ones who had to go from pre-K, (they felt more in control of their own education) and similar academic achievement in the end.

I sure as heck could not have homeschooled them through high school. And they did plenty of things with other kids, and more with mixed age groups than school kids do.

It’s possible the kids you met who were awkward were homeschooled because they were so socially awkward and not the other way around. Mine can socialize circles around me, and I’d say the 2 who started later are more socially adept.

ETA 2 things. Homeschooling is well supported by the school district, kids get tested every year. And no we are not religious.

Former homeschooled kid here. Everything I’m about to say is personal experience but I’ve known many other homeschooled people throughout my life.

With homeschooling you get out what you put in. If the parents take the time to really dial in to the child’s learning needs and set up adequate socialization through after school activities or meetups with other homeschoolers I truly believe it is one of if not the best option for raising a child.

That being said, most of the people choosing to homeschool are not doing it to give their kids the best. Many are narcissistic conservatives who deny modern science and homeschool not to teach the child but to indoctrinate. They don’t consider mental health important. They don’t consider friends important. They consider the kid learning the Bible and toughening up important. The parents are often social outcasts themselves because of their more strict beliefs.

Homeschooling is not a problem and doesn’t result in anything directly, it’s the people choosing to homeschool not being equipped to do it properly. In my experience the kind of parent who would choose homeschooling is likely to produce a social awkward kid even if they don’t homeschool.

TL:DR - Homeschooling good. Most everyone who chooses homeschooling bad. Hug your kids.

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.

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.

The absolute back-breaker of the US educational system. They keep kids out of school to indoctrinate them by completly incompetent people instead of giving them a proper, universal education and the ability to come in regular contact with kids of their age outside the normal circles.

That does not mean that the US school system is the ultimate solution, on the contrary. But it would be much more important to fix that than to allow any yokel to brainwash their kids at home into a next generation undereducated and narrowminded person.

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.

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.

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?

I saw this question asked before and my answer is still the same. I have never met a homeschooled person who wasn’t a fucking idiot. Do with that what you will.