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Comment by matheweis | Hacker News Reader

It’s rather surprising to me that, despite what was an apparently net positive outcome for you and your immediate family, you would have such a negative opinion of homeschooling.

For the others reading the thread (relevant bits of which are linked in the article) consistently shows that on average homeschooled students perform several percentage points higher on academic achievement tests, and a moreover a majority of studies on social development of show positive outcomes for homeschoolers compared to traditional schools. For minorities the net positives are apparently even more profound; the same article mentions a > 20% increase in academic achievement test scores for black students.

Yes, there are good and there are bad situations in all kinds of school, public and private and homeschool alike, but the data appears to be overwhelmingly in favor of homeschooling when compared to a public school.

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Some of those are rosy studies designed to be rosy tho. As in, many of those studies are are as independent as cigarette company paying for research on smoking and health. Also, a lot of effort goes into insulating religious homeschooling families from any independent sight at all.

The elephants in the room he mentions is very real thing too. Fair amount of homeschooling is explicitly social/political project. It is meant to shape both how family structure looks like (who is head of the house) and also meant to create young people that change larger society into religious one. ( Partly you can see it when you listen to homeschoolers talking about public school or even non religious people in general - frankly they often sound like aliens who got the idea from movies. )

Though why the fact some people might choose homeschooling with wrong goals in mind should prevent you from choosing to homeschool your own children, with your own goals and methods, which will be different from what other homeschooling parents would choose?

Yeah, I've noticed a trend in HN homeschooling comment threads where discussion on the personal choice of whether or not to homeschool gets tangled up with discussion about homeschooling on a policy/societal level.

There are some broad concerns about homeschooling that are not relevant to individual decisions. E.g. I don't care that some homeschooling parents use it as a cover for abuse/neglect because I'm not an abusive/neglectful parent. For my child, that's not a risk factor. And as you point out, it's the same for motivational factors.

> apparently net positive outcome for you and your immediate family

My point is I don't think it was net positive. I'd estimate a net negative. I actually think I spent 10 years overcoming serious limits in post-homeschooling areas in social areas. Now, 20 years after I finished homeschool, I don't see any difference in the end between now-peers and myself, even comparing with the homeschool group I was involved in (as I mentioned, I'm on the upper end of "society's success" with that group... most were far less academic than my family).

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