What are your opinions on homeschooling?
My opinion: Both have pros and cons.
I have heard that homeschooled kids are often better academically and more intelligent compared to average students. But they have bad social skills and have a lot of anxiety.
In normal school, you might have better social skills for sure. And you might grow up good if you don’t get influenced by the rotten people at school and if you don’t get into drugs or stuff due to peer pressure. But that’s IF YOU DON’T GET INTO THESE. If you get into these, good luck getting outta these. And there’s the concern of getting bullied too…
So I personally think homeschooling might be a better choice.
In America (and i fear this has spread to other countries), people like Mary Pride have pushed for homeschooling in addition to basically starting the quiverful movement.
The idea is, you keep kids out of school so they are only allowed to learn your far right views, and you have as many kids as possible so you can 1) force the woman to stay at home and 2) have older kids forced to parent and teach younger kids.
You then involve the kids in politics as early as possible so by the time they are adults, they have already made inroads to working with far right politicians.
Some of those kids end up a certain version of smart, but the priorities are different. They might heavily focus on speech debate, both from a religious and a political point of view. On the “good” end of the spectrum, the kids end up truly charismatic and persuasive, and on the “bad” end, it’s basically tiny ben shapiros who just gish gallop you at any chance they get.
Often, but not always, girls are completely neglected since “they only need to learn how to run a home”. Oftentimes kids are abused, and homeschooling is a way to hide that from authorities.
To contrast with all of this, I think there situations where we should be more flexible with homeschooling. If a parent has expertise in a topic, they should be able to cover like a couple classes or something. I knew homeschooling kids who came to public school for a class or two, but I didn’t know any kids who were homeschooling for a class or two.
People in this thread are saying it’s dumb to think you can teach better than a teacher, but if it’s between 1:1 tutoring and being in a class of 30, you have a big step up.
Personally, I found math classes trivially easy basically up until i was like 17. Math classes till then mostly just focused on teaching how to accurately and repeatably do all the things that calculators do perfectly. I could rant about how math is taught a lot, but I won’t. If I had 1 on 1 teaching on a more diverse range of math topics, I could have learned way more. We should be helping parents/kids do that if they can.