I was homeschooled as a child, from 1st through 12th grade, in a large homeschooling community from the late 1980s through the 1990s. I started college in 2000.
I heard all the stories about how homeschooled kids get better standardized test scores and generally enter college with fewer remedial courses, better academic outcomes, etc. I heard all the arguments that "actually, we do socialize, because we can still do Scouts and sports and blah blah blah."
It was all horse shit.
I do not know a single homeschooling family that did not have an issue with the parents eventually slacking off on checking up that the kids were doing the work. And, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the kids just skipped doing any work for most of the year. There would be a mad scramble at the end of the year to concoct a fraudulent portfolio to present to the state-required evaluator. And when the dust settled and all the spankings were done and all the tears were dried, new promises were made to not do it next year. New threats were made that you could "get up at 6am and get on that bus."
It took me until my 40s to realize it wasn't my fault. The people who were the responsible party--i.e. my parents--stopped acting responsibly. The person who is so incapable of being responsible that the state won't even let them drink, drive, or vote (all activities infinitely easier than trying to teach yourself)--i.e. my self--was the one who had all the blame lumped on him.
This wasn't a unique experience. I think maybe 1 kid out of the 30 I knew did not have this experience at least once in their homeschooling life. That one kid was perhaps the smartest, most mature of us; or perhaps she just feared her parents the most. She's also dead now, having killed herself in her early 30s.
For me, it was 4 times.
It was incredibly traumatizing. I lived the first 20 years of my adult life believing I was fundamentally a dishonest and untrustworthy person, and therefore unworthy of anything, especially love and career success. What I was was an irresponsible kid, aka "a kid", who had practically no supervision.
Every parent always said publicly they were doing it for academic reasons. In private, amongst themselves, the true reasons came out: sequestration away from "unauthorized" religious, political, and social ideas. And it always, always leaned right. We couldn't go to school because they were Teaching Evolution As If It's Fact When It's Just A Theory At That School. We couldn't go to school because Ever Since The Immigrants Started Moving Here To Take All The Apple Picking Jobs The Crime Has Been Through The Roof At That School (what the local family practice doctor cared about apple picking jobs, I could never figure out as a child). We couldn't go to school because They're Teaching Homosexuality Is Not An Abomination At That School.
Meanwhile, every single child I grew up with had to face a cliff moment where they had to decide if our collective experience was abusive. The few of us who said yes managed to get through college without dropping out, get moved away from home, get through rounds of suicidal ideation, self-medicating, therapy, antidepressants, and maybe eventually coming to terms and having happy productive lives.
Or they said no, it was fine, and they now live in poverty, have broken homes, still-active alcoholism, or are dead from suicide.
My own mother might be developing dementia and doesn't seem to recall at all things my sister and I agree we remember clearly. Things I've heard my friends repeat in their own stories. Things they've said their own parents also deny. I grew up incredibly lonely. My parents not only sequestered my sister and I from our municipal community, but also to some extent from our homeschooling community, because the one silver lining about my own particular experience was that my parents were not religious zealots. I grew up in constant fear of the State taking me away from my parents just because my mother took me to the grocery store during school hours (a thing my mother asserted could happen, so I better behave to not draw attention to us). I grew up believing society was going to collapse at any time. I grew up believing I was certainly going to Hell because, even though my parents claimed to be religious, we didn't go to church.
To this day, despite the intellectual knowledge that I'm really no different than anyone else, I still cannot shake the feeling that I'm always the outsider looking in, always the interloper trying to masquerade inside, and decode the secret workings of, the social groups I'm in.
This is incredibly difficult for me to talk about. There are many things I still cannot talk about, so please resist the online commentator urge to infer things about my current relationships.
I see people today talking about "we're thinking of homeschooling our children." Not just online, but in my own community, too. I want to scream at them that they have no idea what a gigantic mistake they are entering into. Even assuming they can avoid the dishonest reasoning for why they are doing it, even assuming they will perfectly execute an educational plan for their children over the course of 12 years, they are at the vet least forcing an outsider's complex on their children.
Yes, parents who send their children to public school could still be abusive. Yes, children who do go to public school also develop outsider complexes and plenty of other mental health issues. But at least the child will have a better chance to see that there are alternatives. At least the child will have a better chance to learn that they are a member of a shared society. At least the child will have a better chance to become independent from their parents.
I very much disagree with your point of view.
If you have authoritarian parents with narrow world views, being exposed to other ways of thinking/living in school will only raise your expectations and create resentment against the parents which will generally make things worse for you. And if you are a slacker (and the parents lets you slack) being in class isn't that useful. If you are smart enough you'll get by, doing nothing. But the moment you'll be required to actually put some effort the lack of work will show up and by then it will be too late. On the other hand you could get an early warning if you avoid the hard stuff being homeschooled and it's generally more effective when you figure out stuff yourself, not being spoon fed in a lecture.
And by being at home, time can at least be used for self-guided exploration that are likely to be more useful than whatever they decided to teach in the current era at school (outside of language/math/science later on it's all thinly disguised propaganda anyway). If you are focused on the same things as everyone else at the same time you are not actually building strength around your interests/characters, the only purpose is to make you fit a basic template so you can be "useful" in the labor market. The idea of public school is to make a tool out of you, before anything else.
What you are complaining about is having shitty parents, which is a problem with bad outcomes, regardless if you go to public school or not. And even if you are successful at public school, there is little chance those parents will pay for later studies, so you are mostly setting yourself up for disappointment. You might as well learn to figure out stuff on you own, because you'll need that skill more than anything else when it will be time to leave your shitty parents.
I understand the frustration that comes from the feeling of having "missed something" but I can assure you that unless you were leaving in a very good school district (aka rich, which doesn't seem the case) you really didn't miss anything. Most of the real learning is done outside of school, inside school is mostly endoctrinement.
Everything you've said regarding self-directed study is completely possible for children attending p the institutional education system. Nothing is stopping parents from supplementally teaching their children. Any effort a parent is willing to put into teaching their own children is effort that can be exerted regardless of participation in institutional education. If you choose to homeschool your children, you are discarding that floor. The only reason people choose to discard that floor is because they see that floor as actively harmful. We do not need to labor under any pretention that their evaluation of that harm is correct.
You do your children no favors teaching them they exist outside of the greater social dynamic. You teach them that the society in which they live, which they cannot escape and they must deal with for the majority of their lives without their parents, is not good enough for them. That might be fine for the rich and famous who have a completely different society they can count on to provide opportunity and support for their children, but it doesn't work for the rest of us who have to scrape a living together on our own ability to communicate our value.
You speak of indoctrination. Homeschooling is nothing but indoctrination to the parents ideology. If your ideology is so great, you shouldn't need to sequester your children away from society to convince them it is right. Children are born without prejudice. If they are receiving bad information in public school, it is trivial to teach them otherwise because children inherently trust their parents. Even children who grow up in the most abusive of homes have a hard time coming to terms with the abuse and discarding what their parents did to them. Homeschooling exploits that inherent trust to swing the indoctrination pendulum in the opposite direction.
You say that my experience was due to having abusive parents. Yes. Yes, that is absolutely correct. It takes abusive parents to choose to homeschool their children. By choosing to homeschool your children, you prove yourself an arrogant, self-centered person. Everything that follows thereafter is an extension of that.
I heard all the stories about how homeschooled kids get better standardized test scores and generally enter college with fewer remedial courses, better academic outcomes, etc. I heard all the arguments that "actually, we do socialize, because we can still do Scouts and sports and blah blah blah."
It was all horse shit.
I do not know a single homeschooling family that did not have an issue with the parents eventually slacking off on checking up that the kids were doing the work. And, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the kids just skipped doing any work for most of the year. There would be a mad scramble at the end of the year to concoct a fraudulent portfolio to present to the state-required evaluator. And when the dust settled and all the spankings were done and all the tears were dried, new promises were made to not do it next year. New threats were made that you could "get up at 6am and get on that bus."
It took me until my 40s to realize it wasn't my fault. The people who were the responsible party--i.e. my parents--stopped acting responsibly. The person who is so incapable of being responsible that the state won't even let them drink, drive, or vote (all activities infinitely easier than trying to teach yourself)--i.e. my self--was the one who had all the blame lumped on him.
This wasn't a unique experience. I think maybe 1 kid out of the 30 I knew did not have this experience at least once in their homeschooling life. That one kid was perhaps the smartest, most mature of us; or perhaps she just feared her parents the most. She's also dead now, having killed herself in her early 30s.
For me, it was 4 times.
It was incredibly traumatizing. I lived the first 20 years of my adult life believing I was fundamentally a dishonest and untrustworthy person, and therefore unworthy of anything, especially love and career success. What I was was an irresponsible kid, aka "a kid", who had practically no supervision.
Every parent always said publicly they were doing it for academic reasons. In private, amongst themselves, the true reasons came out: sequestration away from "unauthorized" religious, political, and social ideas. And it always, always leaned right. We couldn't go to school because they were Teaching Evolution As If It's Fact When It's Just A Theory At That School. We couldn't go to school because Ever Since The Immigrants Started Moving Here To Take All The Apple Picking Jobs The Crime Has Been Through The Roof At That School (what the local family practice doctor cared about apple picking jobs, I could never figure out as a child). We couldn't go to school because They're Teaching Homosexuality Is Not An Abomination At That School.
Meanwhile, every single child I grew up with had to face a cliff moment where they had to decide if our collective experience was abusive. The few of us who said yes managed to get through college without dropping out, get moved away from home, get through rounds of suicidal ideation, self-medicating, therapy, antidepressants, and maybe eventually coming to terms and having happy productive lives.
Or they said no, it was fine, and they now live in poverty, have broken homes, still-active alcoholism, or are dead from suicide.
My own mother might be developing dementia and doesn't seem to recall at all things my sister and I agree we remember clearly. Things I've heard my friends repeat in their own stories. Things they've said their own parents also deny. I grew up incredibly lonely. My parents not only sequestered my sister and I from our municipal community, but also to some extent from our homeschooling community, because the one silver lining about my own particular experience was that my parents were not religious zealots. I grew up in constant fear of the State taking me away from my parents just because my mother took me to the grocery store during school hours (a thing my mother asserted could happen, so I better behave to not draw attention to us). I grew up believing society was going to collapse at any time. I grew up believing I was certainly going to Hell because, even though my parents claimed to be religious, we didn't go to church.
To this day, despite the intellectual knowledge that I'm really no different than anyone else, I still cannot shake the feeling that I'm always the outsider looking in, always the interloper trying to masquerade inside, and decode the secret workings of, the social groups I'm in.
This is incredibly difficult for me to talk about. There are many things I still cannot talk about, so please resist the online commentator urge to infer things about my current relationships.
I see people today talking about "we're thinking of homeschooling our children." Not just online, but in my own community, too. I want to scream at them that they have no idea what a gigantic mistake they are entering into. Even assuming they can avoid the dishonest reasoning for why they are doing it, even assuming they will perfectly execute an educational plan for their children over the course of 12 years, they are at the vet least forcing an outsider's complex on their children.
Yes, parents who send their children to public school could still be abusive. Yes, children who do go to public school also develop outsider complexes and plenty of other mental health issues. But at least the child will have a better chance to see that there are alternatives. At least the child will have a better chance to learn that they are a member of a shared society. At least the child will have a better chance to become independent from their parents.