[GuiA]

I can read your comment in several, slightly conflicting, ways:

- homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest

- homeschooling is at a systemic disadvantage because parents that care enough about their kid's education to take an active part in it have no voice in the public schooling system (my understanding of grandparent's point); in addition, they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it.

Am I misunderstanding?

[inetknght]

> homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest

I am not saying that homeschooling in practice is mostly undesirable. Instead, there can be undesirable elements to it. And those undesirable elements are neither common nor easy to spot.

Nor am I saying that it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who aren't going to act in their child's best interest. I certainly think there's an element of truth to it but don't think it's overwhelmingly the case.

My parents did have legitimate reasons to homeschool some of the family. But I think the legitimate issues were leveraged for, indeed, control. Then: I think they bit off more than they could chew (I have a big family); I don't think they realized just how much effort they volunteered of themselves. At the end of a year, they chose to dig their heels in and continue a broken implementation of homeschool and not addressing the problems that came up, instead of risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades and having to answer to the State.

> they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it.

Yes. Maybe not everywhere but it certainly seemed to be the case when I was in California until moved '03.

[souprock]

I certainly know what you mean about "big family" (have 11 so far) and "just how much effort they volunteered of themselves" and "risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades" due to uneven progress.

The out is dual-enrollment, sometimes called running start or concurrent enrollment. In many locations it is free, leading to an AA degree. Because it is scheduled in the style of normal college, with classes chosen as you please, uneven progress is not a problem.

Consider also that the students bear some responsibility and can easily have disasters in public school. If the students choose to dig their heels in, refusing to study, that simply shuts down any kind of education. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Be careful about assuming your parents did worse than a public school would have done, even if things went badly. Some kids just refuse to learn.

[watwut]

> - homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest

To large extend, homeschooling movement was to large extend motivated politically and does attract fringe groups who want to avoid mainstream society. Avoidance of exposure of certain parts of history or sex ed or gender relationships or culture is strong motivation for many of those families.

It did not became popular in conservative christian male is head of household types randomly.

[jf]

As someone who was exclusively homeschooled (and glad of it) my read is mostly of the first interpretation: OP likely had authoritarian parents that used homeschooling as a method of control rather than a way to learn.