We love the schedule flexibility of homeschooling, the ability to let our kids explore their own interests more, and most of all - we just love being with our kids and they get to have their siblings and parents all day.
> That's because teaching kids is super hard and real easy to mess up.
Forgive me, but this is just absurd.
If you gave your kids wonderful educations with excellent curriculum, more power to you.
The issue I have is that's not universal. It's that I've seen far too many examples of children that are illiterate. Examples of lazy parents doing things like taking a walk in the park and saying "see, we did biology today!". Examples of parents that "oops, forgot to do school this week/month".
And, in the extreme, "girls don't need eduction, that's for boys".
Perhaps for you, education is not hard and that's wonderful. Truly. But what about for the parents and kids where it is hard?
> But what about for the parents and kids where it is hard?
If it’s too hard, then public school is right there for you take advantage of. I went to public school and it was just fine.
I had to make up a final exam at school for a subject I didn't take. I covered the entire material for 2 years in a couple of weeks and passed the final. That's pretty much my experience of school- 2 weeks worth of material stretched over 2 years. A glorified daycare system. How can you teach a class of 25 young individuals where 90% couldn't care less, anything?
That said I agree this (EDIT: homeschooling) is not for everyone and not everyone does it for the right reasons.
If your government school gave your kids wonderful educations with excellent curriculum, more power to you.
The issue I have is that's not universal. It's that I've seen far too many examples of high school graduates that are illiterate.
There are plenty of illiterate people in the US. Evidently teaching kids is, in fact, easy to mess up.
And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled. Public education is notoriously inconsistent and frequently produces children that haven't met minimum educational requirements precisely because it lacks the individual attention kids need.
> And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled.
Yeah, I can. Multiple in fact. That's the reason for my initial comment. My experience here isn't exactly unique. Search this threads, there are others raised in these sorts of communities that have similar experiences.
You can find these people to if you like. Simply go attend a fundamentalist religion service and ask around their homeschooling programs. It's really not hard to find if you know where to look.
https://www.nuroretention.com/blog/officials-80-percent-of-r...
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121374...
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/i-couldnt-even-read-the...
https://phdessay.com/can-illiterate-students-graduate-from-h...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/...
https://www.highschoolcube.com/the-high-rate-of-functional-i...
And the list goes on. Several of these articles cite a rate of about 20% of adults in the US being functionally illiterate, with about one third unable to read above a 5th-grade level.
If homeschooling produces better results than that, then I'm all for it. Again: Kids need individual attention which they can get more readily in a homeschool environment. In large institutional public education systems, they just get "passed along" as they may be one of 30+ students in a class, and one of 5+ classes a teacher has. Public school teachers don't have enough time in a week to spend one-on-one time with each of their students. In the 90s my high school had class sizes of 35+ and I'm sure it's worse now in some schools.
I'm on board with criticism of government schools, but home-schooling isn't perfect and I have seen examples where kids were kept uneducated, up to functionally illiterate.
Parents have a right to home-school their kids. There will be kids that come out poorly -- it's going to be _fewer_ than if they'd gone to government schools.