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Comment by space_fountain | Hacker News Reader

I think there are many different experiences of homeschooling and I think for some they do develop strong peer groups without it becoming just a private school. One of the main arguments for home schooling is that done properly schooling will take less long as you can focus on just one or two kids and thus there is time left over for extracurricular. On the other hand as somebody who was home schooled I wouldn't do it with any kids I have. I think what made it bad was that both my parents are introverts.

The amount I've grown socially in the last couple of years of college really makes me annoyed at myself for missed time.

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> The amount I've grown socially in the last couple of years of college really makes me annoyed at myself for missed time.

My experience with homeschooling was very different: I escaped a pattern of bullying for a few critical years, spent those years with much saner social experiences among other homeschoolers and adults, and came back a much more confident teenager. Equally, learning learn on my own has worked out very, very well for me.

All in all, I think the main thing about homeschooling is it increases the variance of results. Yes, some kids do worse than they might otherwise have, but other kids do significantly better precisely because it ends up being a very individual experience. What is clear is homeschooling is very different, and different for every kid, and it's good for society to have a diversity of experiences.

I've thought about homeschooling for middle school specifically because of what you're talking about. That time is just the worst.

But it can be a rough time for homeschoolers, too. In particular, it can be very lonely. (Worse than in public school? Maybe not, but still not wonderful.)

I have pretty mixed opinions on whether it's a good thing, was mostly home schooled myself (some private and public school too) and ended up in foster care voluntarily for some years. Home schooling vastly increases parent control over their kids, considering how "I can teach my kids better than schools can" selects for traits like narcissism, it can get messy. Peer social interaction is definitely an easy thing to mess up as well.

Heard some true horror stories in foster care, like a guy who grew up "homeschooled" by meth addict parents who faked tests, forced him to steal to get back in the house (at least at some points), and left him almost illiterate at 18.

It seems that the problem in this case is not the homeschooling, but the parents. It's certainly true that neither homeschooling nor public schooling would be able to prevent a parent abusing their child. Perhaps the next step should be "public parenting", if parents can't be trusted to act in the best interests of the child...but we already have this (social services, foster care), and I suspect a much higher proportion of publicly schooled children end up in foster care than homeschooled children. However, I've never seen any research data on that. If you don't mind talking about it, roughly what proportion of the kids you interacted with in the foster system had been homeschooled?

Yeah, the people saying "at least you can count on parents to give a shit" really have me scratching my head. If I'm looking for someone to give a shit about a kid, I'd rather draw from teachers than parents.

I think I'd rather trust the parents, but I think you get no guarantees with either group.

Hmm... I'm not sure you can compare the social experience of college to that of public school, particularly if you are an introvert. Public school is notoriously brutal for introverted kids.

Having rotated through public, private and home-schooling I'd say that you weren't missing much. I can obviously only speak from my experience and anecdotes from peers.

The transition from a respectful homeschooled peer group to an institutional Catholic school could best be described as social whiplash. My college peers that were fully educated at home had a much more "pleasant" transition to institutional education as young adults, and were often indistinguishable from other undergrads.

You might have been equally socially awkward in a public high school. I had an extremely hard time fitting into the social scene at high-school because the people/tone were "fake" in my opinion. College however, was great - it was a new start with high quality people and good opportunities.

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