Otherwise, yes, there is incredible untapped human potential wasted in today's schools, unfortunately.
I have close family members who have been home-schooled and they are very well rounded adults.
My daughter (16) is outside the home for: piano, spanish, voice lessons, horse riding, and acting. She currently helps TA kids at a local community theater. This is not to mention the time she spends with her friends.
My son (14) is outside the home for: piano, spanish, soccer. And also to play with his friends.
They also both regularly take extra curricular classes. Just one example: http://ccee.unc.edu/youth-new/classes/bolin-creek/
I went to public school. My kids are much more socialable than I was at their age. The social environment at public school is nothing like the real world and I'm glad to have my kids skip it.
I guess my pint is that our anecdotes cancel each other out but I'm curious to know why you think homeschooling is benefitting your kids. Why do you think you are qualified to teach them the variety of subjects one learns in high school. Why do do you think they are more successful being homeschooled?
It wasn't an exhaustive list of their days.
> How do you know they are socially adept or sociable?
You'll have to take my word for it.
> Why do you think you are qualified to teach them the variety of subjects one learns in high school
We're both college educated. My wife has a masters degree. We use outside/online resources to fill in subjects outside our expertise or that we don't have time to learn ourselves first. My daughter is taking a college level chemistry class. Next year (11th grade) she'll be taking classes at community college. We have both kids take standardized tests each year to measure their progress against their peers.
But honestly, I don't know what your HS teachers were like, but I think I had maybe two competent teachers in my HS. It's not a high bar to beat, no that we'd stoop so low.
I'm assuming you've never taught high school. I haven't either. I do have a lot of experience teaching in higher ed though. I was recently paired with a high school teacher and visited his classroom. I doubt I could teach high school. It's easy to denigrate them but apparently they didn't do too bad with you.
Personally I think think it's absurd for soneone to think that they can teach without any training. There are outliers and seemingly you are one of them. Though you'll never know if you were a benefit or hindrance to your childrens' education. They are clearly successful so it's bit important whether or not it is because of your teaching or in spite of it. One thing is certain though. Your experience is not normative. What you've done has been successful but is it replicable for anything beyond a small percent of families? I'm skeptical.
You keep asking this. It's an absurd question. I'm their parent. I see them every day. I watch them interact with other kids. I see my son stand up for the next door neighbor younger brother against his older brother. I see my daughter keep the peace at a sleep over party with a dozen friends and wildly different personalities. Besides that, you imply that public school confers sociability to children, an assertion with which I disagree. I'll go further: my kids have friends who are both "schoolers" and homeschoolers, and as a rule, it's the home school kids who are more polite, more sociable, more well adjusted.
> but apparently they didn't do too bad with you
I have done okay in spite of high school, not because of it. They were the worst years of my life.
> Personally I think think it's absurd for soneone to think that they can teach without any training.
My cousin is a special ed teacher, and an excellent one at that. She teaches in D.C. I couldn't do what she does, and I haven't claimed that anyone could.
Home schooling is a different situation. It requires dedication on the part of the parent (like doing anything well of course), but it's not that hard. There is a wide variety in how parents approach home schooling, from unschooling at one end, to very disciplined like a traditional school taught at home at the other end. We're somewhere in the middle. Our kids have a lesson plan each year. They have a daily check list of items. We leave it up to them to manage their day. Here's today's:
I'm writing from experience, not just about my own kids, but having family who are teachers and having been involved in the home school community as well as reflecting about my own experience in public school and that of my siblings. I never claimed home school was for everybody, but I think you over estimate its difficulty and give way too much credit to public schooling. I think you underestimate how much time is wasted in public school, and completely discount things like bullying and cliques. My K-12 school years were an awful social environment filled with horrible kids and mostly disinterested teachers, and were nothing like the real world.
> They are clearly successful so it's bit important whether or not it is because of your teaching or in spite of it.
This is condescending to the point that I feel like you're trolling. I have nothing else to say.
Not saying it never makes sense, but I will do a LOT to avoid that being the best option for my kids.
Both kids went to Montessori and my daughter started first grade public school, where she went from loving school to starting to lose her joy of learning. My wife decided she could do a better job, and she has.
I can't speak to anyone else's experience, but for our family it was the right decision, and I'd place my kids' education and socialization against anyone's.
But I can tutor my one child, better than a trained teacher can teach them in a class of 30. That's the real comparison. In a 5-hour elementary school day, if the teacher did nothing but tutor students serially they'd each get 10 minutes. I can beat that in the first half-hour of a home-schooled day.
Its no wonder that home-schooled kids often outstrip their public-school mates. My buddy's 14-year-old was ready for college (admitted to State college) because of this. It wasn't just that he was very smart and motivated. Its about the attention and monitoring that can be accomplished.
A century ago there was another name for home-schooling: it was called 'schooling'. Until public education got invented, it was pretty much the only way.
We've been lucky. We don't need two incomes. My wife as it turns out is a good teacher and she enjoys it. Our kids are good students and enjoy home schooling. We live in a community with tons of educational resources available outside the home.
From the public school establishment, mostly. I'm sure you can find worst case examples of kids who've spent the last five years in the family living room, but I've never met home-schooled children who weren't better socialized than their public school counterparts. The big drawback of traditional schooling is the children are all the same age, which prevents them from modeling their behavior on more mature children.
My next line is,
> I know, hard to tell, right? Ever since I stopped tucking my jeans into my socks, no one guesses that I was home schooled!"
My point is this: I believe you are experiencing a selection bias. When someone that you meet is very poorly socialized, you might dig a little to try to understand why. If this person was homeschooled, you add a tally to the "homeschooled && poorly socialized" count.
Repeat enough times, and you might have many, many marks in that box.
The problem is, when you meet a well-socialized person, you are less likely to _also_ dig and find out if that person was home schooled or not.
It may also surprise you to learn that in many home schooling communities, especially today, there is heavy emphasis on "socializing", and the kids can often learn things that public schoolers cannot.
As an example, I was able to begin working when I turned 16. I didn't work tons, but I was available to work in hours other kids were not, so I was always working around adults. I quickly refined how to interact with adults and learn from them.
Public schools segregate kids by age, so the only adults they interact with are teachers/administrators, not adults in more "peer" relationships.
My hypothesis is that with home schooling, assuming that the kids aren't cloistered in the home, the result is simply that they have more exposure to seeing adults interacting with each other as adults, and therefore are more accustomed to that form of interacting.
When I was young the home schooled kids did seem a bit off, but by the time I got to college the trend seemed to that they were consistently more mature and "ready" for the adult world than average.
That said, I would not tell people to home school unless they were prepared for it. Kids can still have positive experiences at public school; it just depends on the kid.
EDIT: for clarity
Setting up an environment that allows children to learn is ridiculously easy. Food, shelter, freedom to explore and experiment, other children and adults to interact with and discover things, more detailed resources if they end up needing math or something to solve a problem, and so forth. Primary schooling costs something like $200k total per student, and this expense could buy a lot of child-focused structure.
Critically, there's an big economies of scale advantage in schools relative to homeschooling. Resource specialization has advantages. Just spitballing, I'd imagine the curve would show it's at least 2-3x cheaper to provide an equivalent education to a student at a mid-sized school relative to a student in a 5-student homeschool environment, and probably 5x+ for single student - obviously depends on the parent's earning capacity and skill as a teacher. The argument for homeschooling is almost never about cost though, due in part to this enormous disadvantage.
Usually not. School funding is not allocated at the "neighborhood" level but instead the county level. There is almost no difference between per student funding between the richest and poorest counties: http://hechingerreport.org/the-gap-between-rich-and-poor-sch... ("I keep specifying 'state' and 'local' funding because the picture gets more complicated when you factor in federal funding. Once you do, almost all of the funding gaps disappear.").
You can argue that poorer students should get more funding than richer ones to help equalize other gaps. I'm not sure I agree with that. Most of that money would go to middle class teachers and administrators. I bet those kids would be better off if you just wrote them a check (or put the money in a trust fund that would then pay them an extra couple of hundred dollars every month for the rest of their lives).
There are also differences at the neighborhood level. We see that in California quite a bit.
> A yawning gulf separates even school districts serving students from similar demographic backgrounds. For example, in 2009-10, the latest data available, per-pupil revenue was $14,076 in Palo Alto versus $7,679 in Milpitas, both unified districts serving K-12 students. But clearly, affluence counts: In San Mateo County, the Woodside elementary district took in $18,894 per student, while Millbrae elementary got $7,362 per student. [1]
The latter example is a 2.5x difference in funding, within the same county. This is in part due to some local support in Woodside [2] but its more than just that. The gaps are huge.
I disagree about not equalizing gaps, because there's one scarce resource here that isn't even discussed: quality teachers. By default, quality teachers are more likely to want to work in nicer communities, and we don't need to compound that by offering to pay them less (sometimes far less) to work in underprivileged schools.
Meanwhile, giving undereducated kids money instead of education is a great way to fulfill the old adage 'a fool and their money are soon parted'.
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/2012/02/26/some-california-school...
[2] http://www.almanacnews.com/news/2015/12/01/woodside-elementa...
Similar where I live now in Maryland: https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2016/04/26/chart-shows-.... Baltimore City, among the poorest, spends the second most. Surrounding Baltimore County, which is much wealthier, spends substantially less. Montgomery County, the richest in the state and a suburb of D.C., spends about the same as Prince Georges County, a much lower income county next door.