Should people be allowed to be homeschooled?

[zero444440000]

yes people should be allowed to homeschool there kids.

no people should not be be allowed to homeschool there kids.

[BadApple69]

Yes why not?
Schools today don’t teach things that really matter. Years ago they stopped teaching script so let’s see the students who missed that class read the constitution or the bill of rights.
I have head also that as for history they will be starting with the Vietnam war. What about the civil war, revolutionary war, WWI and WWII? Why shortchange the students of history? I know why… too busy teaching about the 192 different genders.


I have a 6 year old and she is going to a private school because public schools are ruined. But not everyone can afford a private school so home schooling is a good option.

[Soteris]

I do not think a single family is capable of providing a quality education by themselves. It is simply too much knowledge and skills packed into too few people to be realistic and I think the children deserves better.

[AaronKrieger]

There's truth to this, but at the same time it's not always an option to go to public schools near you and it very much depends on the family. However, you are still going to miss out on interacting with a good chunk of people in that setting.

[Soteris]

@AaronKrieger True, but the solution to bad public schools is not homeschooling, it is to fix the bad public schools. Also, there is the social aspect that you point out. Children are at the stage where they need to engage other children for their own social development.

[AaronKrieger]

With any problem you're going to need a temporary solution to make other's content while you try to fix it. Also, it should be an option for those who are the exception in our society. Parents can try to balance that out by involving them in sports, clubs, etc. It's not perfect, but neither are public schools.

[MrOracle]

"I do not think a single family is capable of providing a quality education by themselves."

1. Do you think it is some "superior race of aliens" who are down at the public school teaching kids, or is it the same humans that might have (or have had) kids at home at one point? Why do you think a public school teacher has some magical teaching ability that regular people can't have?

2. Who said that home schooling is limited to JUST the parents? I've known several kids who were home-schooled, and it was common for them to spend time with other people to teach them particular skills - often a different person for science and math and maybe someone else for English and writing, for example. They also tended to go on educational field trips to see things with their own eyes and ears, and to hear from experts - from aquariums to factories to planetariums.

3. Home-schooled kids are often able to out-test high school seniors by 8th grade. Clearly something is working.

4. Modern public schools are unbelievably bad in many areas. Teachers often add little if anything, and rely completely on the textbook and the supplied quizzes and tests. And some barely even teach the subject matter at all, instead pushing their politics and activism instead. You might be shocked if you actually saw the state of modern schools.

[Soteris]

@AaronKrieger Again, while its theoretically possible to homeschool it is not realistic and the cost you pay for this is to ruin the future of children who did not get the theoretical. Furthermore, I dont even think you should entertain the idea that public schools would be bad to the point where you have contingency plans for it. It is simply that unacceptable in the first place.

[MrOracle]

"Furthermore, I dont even think you should entertain the idea that public schools would be bad to the point where you have contingency plans for it."

If you don't understand that this is ALREADY the case, and HAS been the case for at least a couple of decades in many areas, then you've had your head buried in the sand. Hell, they've made SAT testing OPTIONAL because so many kids were getting such bad scores, that instead of trying to improve schooling, they simply worked to hide the results.

COVID helped expose how bad public schools (in many areas - not necessarily all) were - because the classes were taught over Zoom, parents were able to overhear what their kids were being taught, and tons of parents were shocked and outraged by not only the poor quality of the instruction, but by the fact that so many teachers had abandoned the curriculum entirely and instead focused on their own political activism for most of the class day.

[Soteris]

@MrOracle
1: People who work in public schools have a specialization. Beyond their specialization they also have a general education in how to be a good teacher. Having more than one specialization is possible but unrealistic. Having them all is basically unheard of and then you also need to pair that with an education in being a teacher. Like it or not, but there is an art in being a teacher. So no, I do not think they are Aliens but I also dont think their education to become a teacher is meaningless.

2: Unless you have the same number of people teaching as a school has specialized teachers then you can't expect the same quality of results. Furthermore, just because SOME kids gets several people homeschooling them does not mean all of them does. By allowing this practice you are still allowing some kids to get a subpar education for literally no reason.

3 and 4: Bad public schools does not justify giving bad, but perhaps slightly better education at home. Fix the bad public schools instead.

Lastly, in my humble opinion it is your own fault for having bad public schools over a longer period of time. You live in a democracy, the policies of your local and federal representatives are an extension of your power to vote. As I have said many times already, in a democracy you get the leadership you deserve. If you misuse your social responsibility to vote then you are going to be punished for it by getting garbage politicians who in turn convert the country to garbage. It all starts from the voter.

[MrOracle]

Yes, it starts with voters. However, there are many more things going on than you might imagine.

For example, my town has doubled in size in 25 years, and nearly all of that growth has been people moving here from ghetto areas in the city. With the rise of Tech in the Bay Area, tech workers bought up whole neighborhoods of old, rundown houses and either gutted and remodeled them or bulldozed them completely and built new. As such, the previous residents were directed to where I live. With this came a huge increase in crime, and a huge increase in undisciplined, unruly kids who cannot be expelled (there are students who have KILLED other students, who were not expelled). And teachers who tried to maintain order and any kind of standards were completely unsupported by the school administration, so either quit or were fired. What is left has been the activist class, who know nothing except their activism, and who also can't be fired because they have the "correct" politics.

And remember how I told you that tons of people moved into my town? Guess what? They VOTE FOR THIS, because they know that if there are rules and discipline and standards of learning, it's THEIR kids who will get held back or expelled, and they can't have that. They outnumber those who care about a quality education.

[MrOracle]

This, generally, has been the same story in every blue state - left-leaning people have flooded into these states over the last 30 years, supporting these policies, and destroying the schools. It's almost impossible to vote them out because so many of the parents with problem kids don't want them to face any consequences. In the school year that ended in June, the high school down the street from me with 1800 students had 17 student deaths - several car crashes, several ODs, several suicides, and several murders. When I graduated in 1988, with 860 kids in my graduating class, and 2550 kids in the school total, we had one student death in my 4 years there (a car accident).

People who can are "voting" with their feet - huge numbers of people have moved to red states if they could - but not everyone has that option. And the answers aren't as simple as you might imagine.

[AaronKrieger]

The thing is, there are exceptions to public schooling, so it should be an option. Let's take my cousin for example, he had to be homeschooled a few years ago, since all the schools around him he kept getting in trouble at (fights, bullies, & drugs depending on the grade). The only way he was going to a new school at the time was to move, which wasn't possible. There were a lot of factors out of the control of the grandparents raising him, so the getting in trouble factor wouldn't stop.

Life is hardly ever straightforward and is usually messy to some degree. It won't be perfect. I do not mean it's an excuse to allow anything, but some people's situations can't help needing that 2nd option due to mistakes made by someone. Anyway, I am not expecting you to fully agree with me, but I wanted to offer a perspective to consider. That's up to you

[Soteris]

@MrOracle First of all, that is anecdotal evidence. Secondly, that is something I can't corroborate and lastly, I dont particularly care either.

The important part for me is that home schooling is not a solution. The nation should guarantee that every children has a certain standard of education, this should be doubly true in USA where you tout the "American dream", about how you can become anything as long as you put in the effort.

Without that foundational education being provided to literally every child, that promise means nothing. You are either given the best opportunity to succeed in the world, or you are not. And here we circle back to the parents and voting. First of all, the people who caused this mess in the first place is the boomers who both ruined politics and severely failed to raise their kids properly. This problem has then compounded through the generations until we get the cluster fuck today.

Allowing homeschooling will only perpetuate this cycle of failure. Kids who has their futures robbed by inadequate education and poor parenting growing up to be worse than their parents and in turn have kids that is robbed by their future who grows up to be worse than their parents etc.. It is a system that reinforces failure rather than success.

The only realistic way to break the cycle and have a generation that is better than the last is to give them the same or better opportunity to succeed which is simply not something that the average parent can provide without a public or private school. Without being given the tools to learn parenting and politics you are just going to have a degradation in quality over time.

[Soteris]

@AaronKrieger Again, you are asking me to accept that a public school should not be enough. I refuse. The public school must be reformed and fixed, there is no alternative. Even if you have your cousin move and enter another school that does not change the fact that the first school is unacceptable and therefore I can't accept just turning away from this problem.

[MrOracle]

We AGREE that public schools need to be reformed - but in a number of US states, there are 70+% of people who WANT the schools the way they are. The only option is to sue the school districts, which is VERY expensive and VERY slow - a student could easily be in elementary school when a lawsuit is filed and graduate from high school before it is finally resolved - and there's no guarantee that it will be solved in the best interests of the kids. The schools are essentially the government, and the government has unlimited tax dollars to pay for court costs, and a common tactic is to delay the suit for YEARS, hoping to run the person who sued out of money so they cannot continue. People have spent millions of their own dollars to bring a suit to a conclusion, and most people don't have that kind of money.

[Soteris]

@MrOracle And yet, no matter how expensive or difficult it is you still have to do it. This is non-negotiable. Bad public schools and those who enables them has to be resolved for you to even have the foundation for a functional country.

[MrOracle]

And, yet, if you are outnumbered 70%/30%, it's not really possible, is it?

[Soteris]

@MrOracle You live in a democracy. You do realize that voting is the literally the lowest bar you can do right? All activism starts after voting and that is how you can drive change in society. It seams to me that you are missing that whole aspect of democracies.

[Stacey55666]

During Covid, kids were sent home. After the Covid scam, kids in Seattle refused to go back to school. Schools had to close and teachers and their pronouns were fired. I think brick and mortar schools should go the way of the phone booth. They're just not needed anymore.

[Anonymous]

Some of the smartest people I know were home schooled. Home schooling usually becomes necessary when local schools are failing. At the moment a lot of schools are operating like babysitting services.

[LazerBean]

Of course. Homeschoolers do better in college and have lower mental illness rates.

[butterly248]

Yeah, I was homeschooled a few times

[gorydetails]

There’s zero reason for anyone to vote ‘no’.

[SnowedIn]

Yes they should.