Homeschooling?

[random_havoc]

A few thoughts:

1) I live in Canada, and in Toronto they recently made some big changes to the sex ed. They now teach a lot more, at at lot younger, and they intentionally don't inform the parents and have told the parents they aren't allowed to remove their kids from those sections.
That'll be the day someone tells me I have no choice about how my kids learn about sex. Better believe I'd pull them out of school altogether before that happens.

2) Upside of homeschooling is that statistically the kids are better academically trained, but in my own anecdotal experience they are more socially awkward

3) Schooling as it exists today is still a relatively new concept to human society. Something to think about is that the teenage rebellion phase isn't actually natural, it's something we've created in our society. There are societies all over the world where the kids work alongside the parents and no rebellious phase takes place. Whereas here they don't work with the parents, they're away from us for hours a day. Plus the rebellious idea is portrayed as normal in the media and shown over and over as the norm. I think homeschooling does help in minimizing the child going through that unnatural phase.

 

[Thundercrack85]

You made the comment in a way to imply it was somehow accurate beyond your own opinion. Although your Wiki source seems on the questionable side as well. Given the source of those numbers is a homeschooling website (HSLDA).

I don't think I did. But in the future, I'll have a disclaimer just for you.

 

[Teelie]

Well, thanks, but I'm not the only one who had an apparently wrong interpetation of your comments so maybe broaden it a bit?

 

[Baramos]

Whatever you do, avoid online cyber charter schools unless your child is self-motivated or you are able to monitor them extensively. Most of the kids I know who are enrolled in those basically just use them to shirk their work. The one neighbor's kid basically got expelled from school for threatening to kill a teacher, and had terrible grades before that. All of a sudden in the online cyber school he was getting Bs, low As, that sort of thing. Graduated, no problems. His senior project according to him was to build a small shed on their property. It's still just the wooden floor, no walls or roof. Maybe he told them it was actually supposed to be a deck.

The other neighbor's kid who is also in this program came by on one of my days off from work, a non-holiday Wednesday, at about 1:00 in the afternoon to try and sell me fundraiser crap. Why wasn't she working hard on her school work, one wonders? (EDIT: Oh, and it wasn't even something decent like hoagies. She wanted me to buy a flag. I think they are insane, whoever came up with that fundraiser)

Of course, outside of these problems, there is the issue that they are probably a terrible way to learn, anyway, but that's a little less tangential.

Real homeschooling is fine if you are capable of providing it. Most parents aren't. My aunt's kids were homeschooled by her for several years--they entered high school performing well below the average of the other students and had to have intense remediation. Wanting to protect your kids from the public school environment is one thing, but unless you are capable of providing them a decent alternative, you are doing more harm than good.

 

[Pink Ranger]

Oddly enough, as I was sorting my GI Joes (don't ask) I actually remember that I was home schooled. Not for regular school; I went to a regular public school all my life. But for some reason my father, a fervent Catholic who would make Thomas More look like a Baptist, kept me out of catechism school and insisted that he himself teach me about heaven and hell. Strange: I need to ask my mother this weekend what his reasoning was.