I’ve been reading this thread and finding it very interesting, since possible homeschooling (I’m pregnant with our first child at the moment) is one of my financial goals. I think I would be a moderate homeschooler – not an unschooler, but not a bought curriculum. Mandated school/study time every day, but not all day sat down at a desk.
Just a bit of background first. You can skip this bit if you like, but I think it’s important context for what comes next. We’re English, and a lot of what I’ve read in this thread about school and religion doesn’t really seem the same as it is in England. (NB: Your public school = our state school.)
Background
State schools vary hugely in quality depending on where you live, but I don’t think what they actually offer varies as much as it does in America. Some schools won’t be able to offer some subjects but they’ll be the fringe ones like politics or certain foreign languages, not the core ones like science. The offering is pretty much the same at every school (following the National Curriculum) but varies in quality. You pick 8-10 subjects to study at GCSE with exams at 16, and 3-4 subjects to study at A Level with exams at 18. Then you go to university to study a single subject. If you don’t want to send your children to state school, you either pay for private school (boarding or day) or homeschool. Private school range from mega-posh places like Eton whose fees are out of all proportion but offer loads of scholarships and bursaries, to total waste of money places where they are no better than the local state school. Most private schools are somewhere in between with varying levels of academic pressure/success and fees. If you homeschool, you get visited annually and basically have to prove that you have been educating your children. It’s not an onerous visit if you have actually been educating your children, but presumably if you have just been pissing around or teaching them obviously fake stuff, you would be referred to social services. When you go to university, they all cost the same but there is a clear hierarchy of quality (with a few exceptions for specialist subjects) so you go to the best one you can get into without comparing cost (except maybe COL).
I do not recognise a lot of the religion described as standard in America. In Britain, if you said to a Christian “Oh right, you’re Christian so you won’t want your children to learn about evolution, will you?” we would honestly ask you what you were talking about. I’m sure those people exist, but it’s really not normal. We’re Christian and believe in science. Adam and Eve frolicking with the dinosaurs is just… what? Not a thing in our country. Comparative religion is taught in all schools here up to a certain level, including (I believe) in Church of England schools. I am 90% sure it’s a compulsory part of the National Curriculum – along with teaching about contraception. If a parent wants to teach otherwise, they are perfectly at liberty to sit little Timmy down when he gets home from school and explain that XYZ that he learnt today is actually wrong and we believe ABC, but little Timmy still has to go to the classes at school. I think the majority of religious people in the UK are totally fine with this. We certainly are. If our child’s mind can be changed (or he can be BRAINWASHED BY THE STATE!!!) that easily then we’ve done a terrible job at explaining our beliefs.
Actual Post
I was a high achiever at an excellent private school, and school sucked for me. It was just such a freaking waste of time. My entire frigging day was taken up by travelling to and from school, moving from lesson to lesson, doing admin like handing out worksheets, doing stupid non-work fill-time tasks…and a few hours of actual learning. During my A Levels I genuinely considered asking my parents if I could stop going and just teach myself and take the exams at the end. I would have got more sleep and had more time to work on my hobbies (some serious, like coding or writing, some frivolous, like trying on all my clothes and painting my nails). I do believe I could have done it, but I also believe my parents would have hit the roof so I never asked.
Someone posted upthread about being held back by the slower children. It’s not that you never get to do the advanced stuff because one person at the back of the class is struggling, but rather that you waste so much time on everyone else’s problems and questions. So at least 50% of time at school for any individual pupil is wasted. That said, I generally respect teachers. I know several as friends, and they have a hell of a job. It’s just a structural problem with putting an assortment of 30 children in a classroom and trying to get them to all do the same thing at the same time.
So I am considering partly homeschooling our future child(ren). I do believe that I am perfectly capable of teaching the whole of primary school, academically. I can print out the National Curriculum to make sure our children are learning what they need to each year, and we can go at it in our own way at our own pace and not be total slaves to the school schedule. I believe that at primary school level, the full, structured school day is just silly. You don’t need that much time to cover the material, and you don’t actually get to do lots of important things like running around and interacting with/shadowing adult life like cooking and cleaning and shopping – and working (I freelance part time, largely from home). I think that we as a family will have a better, less stressful life if we homeschool. I also do not believe that primary school teaches children to be inquisitive and to start thinking critically. I believe I can do a much better job of that at home by engaging with my children’s interests and encouraging them to ask and think about difficult questions.
But it will be mandatory for them to do one or more group activities. Maybe sports, maybe singing in a choir, maybe drama, maybe Scouts… depends what’s on offer locally and what they’re interested in. Because children do need to learn to take turns and play nicely with other children and follow rules set by other adults. I agree that the family dynamic and the friends/acquaintances/strangers dynamics are different and learning to interact with siblings under the watchful eye of parents is not the same. So I will make a big effort to seek out opportunities for them to interact with children of roughly their age outside the home.
However, I would send them to school for secondary school. I think I could teach some academics above age 11, but I would certainly top out at some point, and the start of secondary school is a natural transition point. Also, I would not be able to offer the ‘approved’ structure to prepare them for university entrance. You just have to take GCSEs and A Levels and be funnelled through the application system. Sure, they might end up not going, but I’m not going to take responsibility for hamstringing them like that. I will be sad when they go to school. I will think of all the other things we could be doing together, and I will rue the day I committed to something that requires getting up at 6.30am. I will miss spending time with them in the evenings, when I now have to watch them doing their homework instead. But I think it’s an appropriate age to start to learn that this is the way the system is structured, and they can fit in with it, fight it if they want to, or learn to work around it. I will respect the school rules, but I will allow my child to question them and face the consequences. If they don’t want to do their homework, I’m not getting into a screaming match about it every evening, but they sure as hell are going to go to that detention. I would hope that by then I have taught my child the value of education and hard work enough that it’s not a serious problem. It’s also a good age for them to feel like their parents aren’t watching them all the time. School isn’t real autonomy, but I imagine that as teenagers they’ll feel like it’s better than being at home with their totally uncool, major saddo mum all day. But again, I think the major part of their critical thinking education will still come from us at home, involving them in adult conversation about difficult issues and asking them their opinion. Most of school is an information factory. It’s not where you learn to love learning and get interested in the world.
But oh, I so hope they get a scholarship and bursary to a good private school. Depends where we live, of course, but it would be so difficult to send my child to some shithole state school where a C is a major achievement. And in England we do not routinely have the de facto academic streaming that you have in America. We don’t have an equivalent of AP classes. You do the same A Level course in either a good school or a bad school. It would a be dreadful thing to have to decide to send the children to the local shitty comp or try to patch together GCSEs and A Levels by ourselves/with tutors.
Sorry for the megapost, but the pros and cons of homeschooling is something I’ve thought a lot about.
Executive Summary
Reasons to homeschool for primary school:
- Better and less stressful family life/schedule
- I firmly believe I can teach all the necessary academics
- I also believe I can better teach things that school doesn’t teach
- Less wasting my children’s time
- I believe I can find opportunities for them to socialise in groups with their age groups
Reasons to send them to school for secondary school:
- My ability to teach many subjects will top out
- Let them experience extended time without their parents and with their peers
- Education system structure and the need to take particular formal exams
- School schedule will become less burdensome on the family as they grow older and can sort themselves out (getting up, lunches, getting themselves to school on time)
- Fingers crossed for a scholarship and bursary!