What are your opinions on homeschooling?
My opinion: Both have pros and cons.
I have heard that homeschooled kids are often better academically and more intelligent compared to average students. But they have bad social skills and have a lot of anxiety.
In normal school, you might have better social skills for sure. And you might grow up good if you don’t get influenced by the rotten people at school and if you don’t get into drugs or stuff due to peer pressure. But that’s IF YOU DON’T GET INTO THESE. If you get into these, good luck getting outta these. And there’s the concern of getting bullied too…
So I personally think homeschooling might be a better choice.
I only have anecdotal evidence of what homeschooled people are like. I’m sure there’s a ton of nuance and some homeschooled children are probably taught by extremely intelligent, capable parents and some homeschooled children are probably taught by people who are barely even qualified to be a parent much less a teacher.
That being said… Every homeschooled person I’ve ever met has been what can only be described as “off”. These people become adults with very skewed social skills and even worse, their sense of humor is completely stunted. I think a well-rounded person needs to be exposed to the rest of the world and the people in it starting from kindergarten, and homeschooling cannot reproduce that.
The strangest person I’ve ever met was homeschooled, it was a really sad case. He was an only child home-schooled by fundamentalist christian parents, and didn’t have much interaction with peers his age until he was in college. Zebulon (yes that was his name) could not hold a simple conversation, and clearly had less education than most grade-schoolers. Talking to him was worse than talking to a child, he would babble or ignore everything you said and change the subject completely. I hope he’s overcome that and is doing better now.
This is the kind of thing that honestly makes me a bit shocked that homeschooling is something anyone would expose their child to (bar extreme circumstances). I can’t imagine how bad it would be for a kid to lose the by far most important arena for socialisation during extended parts of their childhood. Like, that’s tantamount to abuse. There’s no other situation where we would allow someone to more or less completely prevent their child from having any interaction with their peers.
Of course, as with anything, there can be circumstances where otherwise extreme or unacceptable things can be justified, I’m not considering those situations here.