As someone who was home-schooled, I absolutely agree with Cosmonaut Star. I dodged the alt-right insanity of modern homeschooling, but I got the “okay sit here and do learning unsupervised for a while” treatment after I turned 11 or 12. Prior to then I feel like my parents did an okay job at making sure I was keeping up with normal kids and taking me to social gatherings and stuff, but that just gradually slipped away the older I got. I feel like I’m still unpacking mental baggage from basically not having a life in my teens.
Thank fuck I got into self-hosting, networking, and Linux/BSD stuff in general as a hobby otherwise I would have zero marketable skills for a job.
My mom wasn’t a alt-right wingnut, thankfully. But she kept me homeschooled despite me asking for regular schooling because she wanted the enabling of abuse. A child who could tell a teacher what she was saying to me was a threat to her. I didn’t go to any schooling beyond some 1st grade, and then she forced me into college when she grew tired of abusing me, until I ran out of support venues and she dragged me back to home.
One homework thing my thought was to just read comic panels from Sunday newspapers archived online. That’s it. I was given old “general knowledge” books but never anything in depth of any study. I had to learn fields from parsing google and Wikipedia, even if she allowed the use of a computer.
I’m sure there’s some legitimate use cases for homeschooling, especially for children who are immune compromised. But I’ve never heard of a happy story of homeschooling, lord knows I’m not one of them. I was held back socially and education wise from my peers, even with my skills.
At the very very least, there should be a way for the state to enforce regular homeschooling standards. Track what grade the kids should be on, how they are doing, and then also economic aid for those who do.
But my personal experience with homeschooling is that it’s never for the betterment of the child, it’s always to enable abuse and submission of the child to the parent. Because new ideas are scary to the parent, and new ideas allow new ways of thinking that the parent didn’t want the child to do.
I’m biased as hell, but when you’re trapped with someone who beats you for a learning disability that would have been accommodated for in a public school that you as a 14 year old asked for, it leaves an impression on you.
I follow a few YouTube channels of people who live on sailboats and travel the world full-time, and some of them have kids. Having a transient lifestyle like that seems like one of the few relatively legitimate excuses for homeschooling, to me.
Having a transient lifestyle like that sounds like you shouldn’t have children, at least to me.