Anecdotally, most current or former homeschooled kids I meet seem pretty socially awkward. I wonder if It’s because the miss-out on the opportunity to learn how to socialize properly as children. But maybe I’m being too critical, idk.
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How will they cut it in life without your help?
Like every other social awkward person?
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.
Working engineer with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree 👋. I credit an older sister who got into the world first who gave warning to us younger ones and the good sense to listen to her advice. I can clock a homeschooler a mile out but the well educated, well socialized ones have put in a lot of effort to get there and I won’t out them if they don’t want to be. The well-adjusted ones don’t talk about it much, same as a public school educated person wouldn’t bring up their grade school experience frequently.
Cool. I’ve met several who went to Harvard, MIT, etc and were extremely successful in life.
You’ve met many people who introduced themselves as homeschooled who were what you describe. You’ve interacted with many more who did not make their school history their whole personality.
I didn’t mean to say all homeschooled people are stupid. Only the ones I met.
Better than sending kids to daytime prison, but still less than ideal, since homeschooled kids (in most countries that allow it), still need to
learntemporarily memorise at those useless school subjects, so instead I advocate unschooling.PS: I understand my opinion is unpopular and politically charged and I really don’t want to argue over this, (since I spent most my young and adult life arguing over this), so I will probably not reply to to replies, since it makes me emotionally unease.
100% depends on the parents’ education and if they believe in conspiracies.
For under-educated parents, your kids need to be in school.
If the parents graduated high-school and are well adjusted, rational people, I see no issue with homeschooling.
People say there are parents who do it for good reasons and do a good job, but I haven’t seen that and find it hard to imagine as being common. The person I know who was homeschooled had his life destroyed by his parents, with homeschooling being the first of a series of horrifying blows to his mental state. He doesn’t know the very basics of how society works or anything about math, science, history, or language, but he thinks he knows everything. He seems to think everything taught to kids in school is wrong or unimportant. But his Internet rabbit holes? Invaluable.
Ps he was homeschooled because his parents were religious extremists.
I think it is economically disadvantageous to occupy more people than is necessary to perform education activities. On average, trained professionals will do a better job at most things.
Wonderful day!
And again… I am sorry, but why not just read about it, like… professional researches from both modern and ancient times, existing centuries… Why ask people to invest their priceless finite life time to, again, respond with a yet another set of written messages for the case of multiple investigations/analyses around the planet?
It’s an incredibly responsible question for the parents/supervisors, and there are serious researches done for it. The answer affects the whole future of the child/person they will depend on all their ongoing life… and, hopefully, their own children…A school is not a home, in general, I believe. One of main the main reason a school is exists is - socialization. That is, gaining skills of creating social connections, learn to educate yourself and deal with interruptions and distractions in social environments with so different people, worldviews, and beliefs, in attempt to find yourself and your own identity alongside other people.
Since isn’t the most important reason for these to help a person to socialize and get used to crowded or accompanied environments, to respect, care, tolerate, or live and do their research within other ultimately infinitely magnificent unique people?
It’s for the parents/family to decide, since every single child/person is different.
I do normally stand against “homeschooling” (“wetdrying”) and push towards a socialized organization like University, School, Kindergarten etc.The following is an excerpt from earlier discussions I’ve just found in personal notes:
Socialization process has a significant impact on learning, which is a basic requirement for both the organization and the role performance of the newcomer to the organization. It is considered very important for a new member to socialize organizationally and professionally. This paper focuses on revealing the process of organizational and professional socialization of academicians.
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Friendships can positively impact students’ academic performance and grade point average (GPA) by providing emotional support and reducing stress, thereby leading to improved focus and better concentration on studies.
Peer connections and friendships often result in collaborative learning and the exchange of academic ideas, improving comprehension and retention of course materials, ultimately leading to higher GPAs…
Academic success is assessed by gauging academic performance in the form of grade point average (GPA), test scores, and overall academic achievement, as well as the measurement of academic motivation and the level of persistence among students in school or college.
Forming friendships with their peers is an important aspect of adolescents’ and young adults’ lives, and significant research has been conducted on how friends impact academic performance and motivation. Specifically, academic achievement and motivation have been found to positively correlate with belonging to a peer group.
Currently, young people’s need for a sense of community is particularly high, leading individuals to spend more time with their friends, feel more comfortable around friends than they do with family, and worry about how their friends will perceive them and how the local social milieu will view them.
Researchers’ concerns about how social networking sites affect different aspects of life, including education, are not surprising. Academic achievement has been linked favorably to social connections or peer interactions in the past.
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Of course, in a large population, there are going to be some success stories. But we have zero evidence that, on average, homeschooled students are doing well. There’s actually no way to learn how they do on average because homeschoolers don’t exist as a visible population due to the lack of regulation.
There are claims being made in what is really junk social science that homeschooled students do just as well as kids in regular schools. But there is no justification for those claims. People making those claims are looking at a subset of the most successful homeschooled students.
They’re looking at the ones who actually apply to college and go to college, and are assessing how they do in college compared to kids coming from public schools. Those studies tell us nothing about how well homeschoolers do on average.
Source: Harvard
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Most of the time when I overheard these women talking about their educational choice, and why they were doing it, the reasons seemed to have one thing in common.
Can you guess what it was? Fear.
Related: Why homeschooling is bad for kids (Debunking the myths…)
Depends heavily on the parents. I had a few cousins who were home schooled for primary school so up until 10yr and they were 100% different to interact with and at the time I thought they were nerdy. But looking back it was because they were better socially developed and more mature than my friends and I. They were far more polite to kids (we were all polite to adults), smarter on topics we learnt in school (they didnt know about stuff like fighting and stealing from the local dairy and couldnt even ride a bike or swim) and more empathetic because they spent most of their time interacting with adults who’d correct bad behaviors while my friends and I would be socializing with kids unsupervised for most of the day.
But we all turned out fine and had good upbringings.
In my eyes, the two biggest problems are teaching competence and socialization. It’s possible for a parent to adequately cover a wide range of subjects if they’re quite intelligent themselves and they have good materials, but school teachers specialize in a few subjects and have plenty of experience teaching. Sure, a parent might have specific issues with parts of a curriculum, or think it isn’t suitable for their child’s intelligence, but that can be covered with spot checks and home study.
The bigger problem seems to be socialization. Sure, there are meetups and extracurriculars, but I don’t think that can really replace being around.dozens or hundreds of students your own age, navigating social situations shoulder-to-shoulder with your peers. These are critical skills, arguably more important than the bulk of the actual school curriculum, and it’s much more difficult to build them later. We are social creatures, and we learn best through immersion. Like you, most of the homeschooled kids I knew were socially awkward.
I think much better than homeschooling is supplementing schoolwork with individualized study.
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.
I have friends in the old country who do homeschooling. They’re the kind who do it for good reasons. The amount of controls, checks and justifications the parents have to go through constantly is huge. Constantly prove the teaching methods, program, environment, everything. So there are ways to permit homeschooling that seem better it seems.
This… I remember one of our neighbors finally letting their homeschooled kid go to public school and play with us. We had to teach him how to run. I remember my young mind being baffled by this. He was incredibly naïve and overly trusting so he got bullied mercilessly and beat up at recess. His mother did him no favors by being really nasty with us when we went over to take him fishing, exploring, etc. We moved away and i wonder what happened to him… he was a gentle soul.
Aw that’s so rough on the poor guy, it likely did him a world of good moving forward that he had friends like you to open his eyes, even if it was a short time.
I had the reverse happen where I was teaching the public school kids that you could climb trees. I’m sure it wasn’t mindblowing for them, but they had just never thought about it before. We were like 13 at the time.
I had a wonderful experience too, my parents really put their heart and soul into me and my siblings and we had a local homeschooling group larger than one of the nearby schools that did minimum weekly outings and the like.
I’m an electrical engineer now, my sisters are lawyers, bankers, and concert pianists, my brothers are studying for medical doctorate and running a forge, and many of my friends are in similar places.
Just to add my voice to yours, it’s absolutely all about what you put into it. I have deep lifelong friendships from my homeschooling days, the heavy intent our parents had on the social aspect was imperative. I joined after school activities by the local high-schools later on and met some great public school friends.
The natural flow of learning time-wise vs the rigidity of public school is a studied and proven to be far more conducive to education, as well, and I wish public schools would learn this.
Mine and my siblings’ and friends’ experience was amazing compared to most if not all of my public school friends, and it was all thanks to our parents pouring their lives into giving us all of the knowledge and environments we needed. It can definitely not go this way, if the parent isn’t actively providing those environments, but it is and always will be an issue of the tool being used incorrectly.
Just need to correct one small thing.
I had a wonderful experience too
My experience was absolutely terrible and I would have been better off in a public school. My parents were proof of why homeschooling is the wrong choice 99% of the time
I was homeschooled by such parents as you describe, and I still have social difficulties in my 30’s because of it. I also wasn’t hugged at all, but I don’t think that alone would have fixed it 😛
Yeah the ones I know only see Facebook news (pushed by Russian bots and right wing propoganda) about how public schools are evil and bad and you should definitely send your child to private religious school (who definitely won’t rape them) or home school them to install horrible values to ensure they grow up to vote regressive .
Its bad man.
It works best as an addition to, rather than replacement for, public schooling.
Just in case, homework != homeschooling. Homework is one of the most important/mandatory part of general common school process, I believe, that lets a person some private time to realize and memorize the subject in their own pace, and prepare for following public discussions and development.
No, I’m talking about parents educating their children on academic topics outside of school hours. This is especially useful for very gifted children who may benefit from advanced martial; or for children with learning differences that may need additional instruction on topics other kids grasp intuitively; or for children with special interests that fall outside of what school has time to cover.
But it’s my firm belief that the more schools fall into the trap of “teaching to the test” the more important it is that parents take an active role in teaching history, civics, philosophy, art, and practical skills, all subjects that more and more schools are leaving behind.
I see. Thank you! That makes sense. This probably also proves my point of belief highlighting a school as a system mainly not for education but socialization in education. A system to educate in society and learn critical/common skills to socialize while learning together - realizing/educating together.
It’s bad for kids. Like, objectively proven to be bad.
While I can imagine all the nightmare scenarios, I’ve known a number of homeschooled kids who grew up with distinct advantages. There are flaws with public school too, as I’m sure you’re aware. At the end of the day, the problems surrounding proper education of children from wildly different situations are not solved with identical tactics.
Do you have links to back this up? The only thing I’ve seen that’s been proven to be bad is how homeschooling is usually done, especially in America.
This is a subtle but important distinction. Homeschooling is not the problem. The lack of oversight and regulation is the problem. The lack of proper structure is the problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending it and do think It’s the wrong choice 99 times out of 100. But saying homeschooling in and of itself is the problem isn’t right.
so I did one year of a homeschool co-op where we only had class on Fridays and the rest of the week was homework. I fucking LOVED IT.
Now, this particular program was pretty mediocre in terms of educational quality, mainly because it was religious nutjob oriented. I had the good fortune that my mom is a natural at teaching and I already knew how to learn stuff from the internet fairly well for a 7th grader in 2007 (identifying quality sources, etc.)
the main benefit to me was a VERY MUCH APPRECIATED escape from being mercilessly bullied at the traditional (well, also private religious, but still in-person daily) school I had been at for 5 years. Just being able to hit a hard reset on the group of kids I went to school with was already a huge social boost, and additionally, I only had to socially interact one day a week so even bad days weren’t completely overwhelming.
If I hadn’t had my mom to ensure I was actually learning stuff, maybe it wouldn’t have been worth it. But fortunately I had her, so my educational progress didn’t completely capsize and I finally started making some progress learning how to interact with kids my age somewhat normally, instead of just isolating myself
TL;DR one type of home schooling is a co-op that meets weekly or so, and that could have a lot of benefits if your kid is socially stunted from being bullied into oblivion
It took me years to overcome getting homeschooled for my first two years of high school. Learning how to socialize and deal with other people is an essential skill for the rest of your life and arguably more important than anything else they teach you - you can catch up on academics relatively quickly but nothing can replace daily interactions with your peers over multiple years. Everything important requires at least a little social skill - jobs, relationships, friends, peer networks
School is socialization for kids.
Homeschooling doesn’t give you that.
