Yeah it's just a popular way for child abusers to not get caught.

The major homeschooling lobbyist group is insanely powerful, think NRA. There's basically ZERO checks/balances. They oppose all regulation of any sort, even shooting down laws meant only to protect kids.

• homeschooling kid who grew up somehow thankfully

Religion and the fear of "woke" things being taught to their children like evolution, sex education, history,science.....

I have advanced college degrees in science/engineering, I watch electronics and chemistry videos for fun, and I wouldn’t feel qualified teaching most subjects past 6-7 grade. How some of these parents with just high school diplomas do it is beyond me.

I feel the most empathy toward the students who are taught these very myopic curriculums that are very weak in science and math (I’m looking at you young earth/creationists types) and who knows what about history (slavery gave African-Americans jobs skills?) that try to get into college. Most profs will not suffer fools like this even if by some miracle they get accepted in the first place.

I pulled my kid, primarily because the local school district is awful, and because they harass kids (and their parents) into coming to school sick, leading to constant outbreaks of illness, especially since COVID. As an unexpected bonus, it was refreshing to see my kid actually enjoy learning for once.

Sometimes parents homeschool because they want their kids to learn more. Sometimes they homeschool to have their children learn less.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/homeschool-conference-curriculum-girl-empowerment_n_652445c9e4b0102e6962fd39

Right Wing propaganda, and their concerted war against public education. They do this for two reasons:

1 - They're so greedy they hate paying taxes. Any taxes, even though they take full advantage of what taxes pay for (roads, police, fire department.)

2 - Illiterate and uneducated people will believe whatever they're told, and take whatever is offered. Those raised Christian are programmed from childhood to blindly obey male authority figures.

In short, Republicans want to create a Neo-Feudal Theocracy, with themselves as the aristocracy.

Im just gonna make a wild guess and say because "religious" nuts, isn it?

Ive always found the idea of homeschooling utterly bizzare

Idiots

Our school system offers online schooling and we had to put our daughter in it at least temporarily, because she was the most bullied kid in her school and it got to the point one day that she broke down and cried and said she couldn't go to that school one more day. So I'm glad that option is there, but I have big issues with it, especially with English, because the education company they contracted with only uses public domain texts and your average seventh grader whose experience with English has been books like Hatchet and The Giver, can't parse at all. Plus, it's stuff like H. H. Munro, who wrote stories about Edwardian English aristocrats, so she can't understand the texts both because of the language and the fact that she has no frame of reference. The English teacher I'm emailing about it doesn't seem to care, but I'm basically having to walk her through the lesson each time and go through the text slowly, reading it to her so she doesn't mess up all the hard words, and stopping every few sentences to explain to her what's going on. We've only been at it a week, and it's such a needless slog. She has no trouble at all with the parts of the English lessons that don't involve those texts. She understands all the concepts being taught. But 19th century literature is not appropriate for an average 7th grade reader.

Eventually, we want to get her into another middle school, but she needs a mental break from being around other kids to heal. This is ridiculous though, and I have no idea how other kids in this program get through it, because we were told everyone from kids with psychological issues to kids who were expelled are in the online school and I doubt those expelled kids are able to follow an O. Henry story about a safecracker full of slang with an ironic twist ending.

Theoretically, in Indiana, we could just pull her out of the school system entirely and find some other homeschool curriculum for her to follow. It's totally unregulated here. But then we wouldn't have anyone to turn to if we needed help. At least in this case, there's a teacher I can eventually browbeat into doing a tutoring session.

We're just lucky I'm on FMLA right now, otherwise she would just fail out of this entirely.

Sorry, not all that related to what is going on. I just needed to vent. I feel so trapped with my daughter.

Last Week Tonight recently did an episode on this.

Anecdote: the lady nextdoor is fucked in the head and couldn’t let her kid have a normal childhood experience until the 7th grade (I think).

The anti woke movement.

Let me present my counter-tale to all the anti-home school comments.

My kid is autistic and the schools are some of the most poorly funded in the country. Despite this the school did an excellent job and had very good staff that did a very good job. But as my child went up in grades the resources available decreased. It was quickly heading for a point where the 1-on-1 time they would need wouldn't be available. Then the pandemic hit. We were forced into online school when the school closed for a bit. The amount of specialist time available dropped to near-zero.

The school wasn't prepared for online school and the sites/curriculum they used were all over the place. We supplemented with our own field trips and additional resources. But they otherwise took to it really well and were still learning.

The next school year our school still didn't have its act together. We found a different online school that actually had good curriculum. They've been going to that ever since and it's gone really well.

BIG CAVEATS: I used to be a public school teacher. My degrees are in that, and I was certified. I work in a different field now, but I still have that background to know adolescent psychology, how to evaluate curriculum, knowledge of what is grade-level appropriate, etc. My partner specialized in language and writing, while I was science, math, and tech. We take great pains to socialize our child with outside activities, and make sure they read and participate in art/creative activities. My partner is stay-at-home with the primary job of seeing to our child's education. I help but assist in my areas of expertise.

TLDR; Home school IS used as a way for a lot of parents to enable hyper-religious or abusive behavior, but that's not universal. In some cases it can be the best solution for the child.

For us it was 1) our work schedules weren’t conducive to taking kids to school as there is limited bus service in CO and 2) we both went to the best public schools in our area of NoVA and they could have done better in a lot of ways. Neither of us are fans of the public school system having been products of them.