I’m sorry this is so long, but I’ve put a lot of thought into this matter over the years, so I implore you to consider this decision very carefully before actually doing it.
Good homeschooling isn’t impossible, but my main issue with homeschooling is that many, perhaps most parents are either incapable or unwilling to put in the huge amount of effort that would be required to rival or surpass a typical public school education. I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack, it just seems like a lot of parents thinking about homeschooling don’t realize just how difficult it would actually be to do well. They bite off more than they can chew and the only one who really suffers for it is the kid. Your options for a decent home education are basically total personal dedication, treating it like an unpaid 60 hour a week job, or being wealthy enough that you can pay for private tutoring to free your time up. Otherwise, it would be a very difficult undertaking. The following questions are mostly rhetorical, just some things to think about:
Are you able to spend the time to do it right? 6-7 hours of actual hands-on instruction, 5 days a week? That much time would of course require a stay-at-home parent, something many or most families can’t afford to do. In addition, will you still have time to be able to homeschool as well as run necessary non-schooling errands in the same day? Things like grocery shopping, going to the doctor, cooking lunch/dinner, doing things after school, etc. This 6-7 hours also does not count towards any time you’ll have to spend outside of lessons, such as reviewing teaching materials, reviewing your child’s study materials, designing overall course curriculums, designing a daily lesson plan for each subject, physically setting up lessons/experiments, creating assignments/tests, grading assignments/tests, taking your kid to do extracurriculars, etc., so it’s more like 10-12+ hours per day. And if you were planning on just downloading all that stuff online or pulling it right out of a homeschooling book, that’s perhaps not even as good as what those unmotivated teachers you complain about would’ve done (which are actually pretty few and far between, in my experience). One of the best advantages of homeschooling is that it can be catered to your kid individually, but over-reliance on premade materials can have many parents delivering a cookie-cutter experience regardless.
Schools also have plenty of specialized staff because they know it would be impossible for one teacher to do everything by themselves in an effective way. What’s your plan to ensure you can cover each topic as well as a group of people who largely specializes in teaching that subject? Do you actually know the material well enough to teach it in the first place? Many parents simply aren’t informed enough on a given topic to teach a whole unit on the subject, and you might have to try to answer some pretty advanced questions.
Is this what your kid actually wants in the first place, or is it what you want for your kid? You seem to be under the impression that your kid would choose homeschool over public, but is that really true? Sure, it’s anecdotal, but everyone I’ve known who’s been homeschooled says that it was a net negative experience for them and that they’d have been much better off just staying in public school. They missed seeing their friends everyday, they felt they hadn’t learned as much as their peers and struggled in college, they felt their parents had dropped the ball in general. At the same time, it would have saved their parents a lot of time, money, and prevented an unfavorable result. That saved time, energy, and money could then in turn benefit the child by providing better rested parents who have the time and resources to go out and do fun things with them. It’s definitely still possible to have a great relationship with your kid even if they’re in public school, and they may benefit from the space it affords.
What is your plan to ensure adequate socialization of your child? I’ve known several homeschooled kids and they were all noticeably a bit socially stunted. I’d hope in addition to all the schooling you do, you can frequently still find time to take them to the park, enroll them in a sport or club of some kind, and otherwise provide many opportunities for them to make new friends/hang out with old ones.
Overall, homeschooling isn’t inherently bad, but I haven’t personally ever seen it done well. Providing a place full of love and support for your child is commendable, but I don’t know if the love of a parent alone is automatically a good replacement for a thorough education by a whole team of instructors alongside their peers. You admit that homeschooling has a bad reputation “because you only hear about shitty experiences,” but this seems like a good opportunity to quote another one of your comments, “So close…” I’m not saying good homeschooling doesn’t exist, but if we only hear about bad experiences, perhaps that should lend credit to how hard it is to do well and how many fail despite trying.
Thinking back to my own school days, elementary was something like 8:30-3:30 and high school was something like 7:30-2:30. That’s 7 hours in total, but yeah, if you include a 15 minute break in the morning, a 5 minute passing period, and a half-hour lunch, it’s only a little over 6 hours. I don’t recall elementary school well enough to remember a typical day’s schedule, but it was probably slightly less. I think you could still call 6+ hours with a few breaks 7 hours, though. Also, most kids do attend school 5 days a week.
My definition of “hands-on” is what you’d see in a typical public high school, with a teacher personally leading the lesson and guiding discussion, often using supplementary materials to help illustrate their point. This may include the occasional experiment and field trip. I meant specifically that the instructor needs to be hands-on, as in physically being there to teach the student, but hands-on learning for one’s child is also important, of course. Perhaps I should have included a point on multimodal learning and developing diverse lessons that will stimulate a child’s curiosity in a variety of ways. My intention was to differentiate the typical style of teaching from the very common form of “homeschooling” where the parent gives their kid a textbook and leaves them alone for the next 4 hours, patting themselves on the back for another good day of teaching. Even a boring PowerPoint lecture would be better than that. Homeschooling affords the opportunity to learn in unconventional ways, so to waste it all by spending every moment inside reading from a book would be a real shame.
I’m sorry this is so long, but I’ve put a lot of thought into this matter over the years, so I implore you to consider this decision very carefully before actually doing it.
Good homeschooling isn’t impossible, but my main issue with homeschooling is that many, perhaps most parents are either incapable or unwilling to put in the huge amount of effort that would be required to rival or surpass a typical public school education. I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack, it just seems like a lot of parents thinking about homeschooling don’t realize just how difficult it would actually be to do well. They bite off more than they can chew and the only one who really suffers for it is the kid. Your options for a decent home education are basically total personal dedication, treating it like an unpaid 60 hour a week job, or being wealthy enough that you can pay for private tutoring to free your time up. Otherwise, it would be a very difficult undertaking. The following questions are mostly rhetorical, just some things to think about:
Are you able to spend the time to do it right? 6-7 hours of actual hands-on instruction, 5 days a week? That much time would of course require a stay-at-home parent, something many or most families can’t afford to do. In addition, will you still have time to be able to homeschool as well as run necessary non-schooling errands in the same day? Things like grocery shopping, going to the doctor, cooking lunch/dinner, doing things after school, etc. This 6-7 hours also does not count towards any time you’ll have to spend outside of lessons, such as reviewing teaching materials, reviewing your child’s study materials, designing overall course curriculums, designing a daily lesson plan for each subject, physically setting up lessons/experiments, creating assignments/tests, grading assignments/tests, taking your kid to do extracurriculars, etc., so it’s more like 10-12+ hours per day. And if you were planning on just downloading all that stuff online or pulling it right out of a homeschooling book, that’s perhaps not even as good as what those unmotivated teachers you complain about would’ve done (which are actually pretty few and far between, in my experience). One of the best advantages of homeschooling is that it can be catered to your kid individually, but over-reliance on premade materials can have many parents delivering a cookie-cutter experience regardless.
Schools also have plenty of specialized staff because they know it would be impossible for one teacher to do everything by themselves in an effective way. What’s your plan to ensure you can cover each topic as well as a group of people who largely specializes in teaching that subject? Do you actually know the material well enough to teach it in the first place? Many parents simply aren’t informed enough on a given topic to teach a whole unit on the subject, and you might have to try to answer some pretty advanced questions.
Is this what your kid actually wants in the first place, or is it what you want for your kid? You seem to be under the impression that your kid would choose homeschool over public, but is that really true? Sure, it’s anecdotal, but everyone I’ve known who’s been homeschooled says that it was a net negative experience for them and that they’d have been much better off just staying in public school. They missed seeing their friends everyday, they felt they hadn’t learned as much as their peers and struggled in college, they felt their parents had dropped the ball in general. At the same time, it would have saved their parents a lot of time, money, and prevented an unfavorable result. That saved time, energy, and money could then in turn benefit the child by providing better rested parents who have the time and resources to go out and do fun things with them. It’s definitely still possible to have a great relationship with your kid even if they’re in public school, and they may benefit from the space it affords.
What is your plan to ensure adequate socialization of your child? I’ve known several homeschooled kids and they were all noticeably a bit socially stunted. I’d hope in addition to all the schooling you do, you can frequently still find time to take them to the park, enroll them in a sport or club of some kind, and otherwise provide many opportunities for them to make new friends/hang out with old ones.
Overall, homeschooling isn’t inherently bad, but I haven’t personally ever seen it done well. Providing a place full of love and support for your child is commendable, but I don’t know if the love of a parent alone is automatically a good replacement for a thorough education by a whole team of instructors alongside their peers. You admit that homeschooling has a bad reputation “because you only hear about shitty experiences,” but this seems like a good opportunity to quote another one of your comments, “So close…” I’m not saying good homeschooling doesn’t exist, but if we only hear about bad experiences, perhaps that should lend credit to how hard it is to do well and how many fail despite trying.
Public school gives better education, but if the goal is indoctrination and total control of the child, homeschooling comes out on top.
I’m not sure what the split is between controlling vs misguided parents. Have there been any studies on that?
I agree with your point overall, but kids don’t get 6-7 hours of ‘hands on’ instruction 5 days a week at school.
Thinking back to my own school days, elementary was something like 8:30-3:30 and high school was something like 7:30-2:30. That’s 7 hours in total, but yeah, if you include a 15 minute break in the morning, a 5 minute passing period, and a half-hour lunch, it’s only a little over 6 hours. I don’t recall elementary school well enough to remember a typical day’s schedule, but it was probably slightly less. I think you could still call 6+ hours with a few breaks 7 hours, though. Also, most kids do attend school 5 days a week.
My definition of “hands-on” is what you’d see in a typical public high school, with a teacher personally leading the lesson and guiding discussion, often using supplementary materials to help illustrate their point. This may include the occasional experiment and field trip. I meant specifically that the instructor needs to be hands-on, as in physically being there to teach the student, but hands-on learning for one’s child is also important, of course. Perhaps I should have included a point on multimodal learning and developing diverse lessons that will stimulate a child’s curiosity in a variety of ways. My intention was to differentiate the typical style of teaching from the very common form of “homeschooling” where the parent gives their kid a textbook and leaves them alone for the next 4 hours, patting themselves on the back for another good day of teaching. Even a boring PowerPoint lecture would be better than that. Homeschooling affords the opportunity to learn in unconventional ways, so to waste it all by spending every moment inside reading from a book would be a real shame.