My wife are secular homeschoolers and have homeschooled our 3 kids: 10,8,5 for 5 years.
We use outschool regularly, its a great platform to introduce random topics. I would invest in it honestly.
AMA I guess
My wife was from a very competitive school district which forced overachievement and I got beat up by bullies in a small town school. Besides the personal anecdotes,
1. we felt like time was passing too quickly and wanted to have them around, we wanted to be together basically.
2. with 3 kids my wife hasnt been able to work (her line of work is not well paying), so it made sense to start homeschooling vs private schooling.
3. I have issues with what public schools are now, hyper focused on testing, lack of critical thinking, no outdoor time.
The "socializing" concern is a farce imo. Granted we live in area with plenty of groups. Maybe a solo kid way out in the sticks will have problems. Our kids also regularly play with kids 2-5 years older or younger so things are different. Our kids have activities with other homeschool kids 4 days a week.
The schedule looks like this:
M: Outdoor Nature camp: think building fire with bow drills, axes, skinning animals, foraging for wild plants
T: Academic day at home then occasional horseback riding
W: Academic day at home, private music lessons, then playdate at friends house
TH: Homeschool meetup group: think art, music, dance, karate, extracurricular classes with a group of 100 kids and 10 teachers
FRI: another Homeschool meetup group: with various classes and open play
I was homeschooled for 8 years and this schedule sounds very familiar, except it was surfing and working a part time job for me. School does not need to take 8 hours to be effective.
As far as socialization, I’ve been asked this a hundred times: “so...like...how do you talk to people when you’re at home?” Now, I understand they mean well. But for someone who just implied their superior social capabilities, they sure seem rude and unsocialized. ;)
Most schools are just like jails: you are forced to be there, and forced to be there with people who don't want to be there either. A good recipe for disaster as soon as the group becomes large enough. And don't expect the guardians/educators to do anything when someone picks up on you.
> And don't expect the guardians/educators to do anything when someone picks up on you.
Well that's not entirely fair. I know of several situations (including my own) where students were punished for fighting when attacked by other students. You can't say that's not "doing something", I guess.
Social environment _anywhere_ is far from ideal. I've felt that school gave me great training at recognizing and dealing with assholes. I was more of a sensitive kid and if I was isolated from school (and the playground), I may not be able to join the society later on - the state of it it would've been too much of a shock.
Yes, we don't really know what a good social environment for children looks like.
But it does seem obvious that being forced to associate with brutes is unpleasant, demoralising and inconducive to academic learning. By the same token why not teach people to deal with pain by tapping them daily with hammers?
We also have to factor in also that many people will become brutes as a result of this forced association, like the way criminality incubates in prisons.
This seems extraordinarily well-balanced. I'm often skeptical of homeschooling (especially for religious or political reasons), but you've got a great curriculum and motivation.
Congratulations on doing it right with regards to socialisation. Sadly, many homeschoolers (in my anecdotal experience) do it wrong - they tend to be the same ones who homeschool for religious reasons.
Also anecdotal, but I suspect that the religiously motivated homeschoolers were already going to suffer socially, homeschooled or not. The only way that government schools would have altered the outcome was by providing peers to challenge their (often poorly-supported) religious positions. Assuming the methodology bordered on bullying, I'm not sure that would necessarily lead to an outcome of better socialization. I could certainly be wrong, though.
An interesting example is the Westboro Baptist children. They are sent to public school in order to learn about how rotten the sinners are. The bullying they receive helps to drive home that lesson.
In my experience (from moving in religious homeschooling circles) it's more that they're doing it to "save" their children from the "world" - so having them at home is them already doing the best by their children, so having accomplished that, they're less worried about ensuring regular socialisation.
And as they often have large families, their children have a large number of sibiling so aren't lonely, so they presume it's all good. Which just leads to entire families of socially inept homeschoolers.
Whether or not religious people retain their views is not the benefit of socialisation - being able to function in everyday human society through direct experience of it, not a carefully curated and managed microscopic subset, that's the advantage.
I agree with almost all of what you're saying. I'm not suggesting that a social experience outside of the purview of the insular groups this small subset of religious folks experience is not beneficial. What I'm suggesting is that the particular experience offered by public schools (especially in rural and semi-rural areas insular religious homeschoolers typically inhabit) is not particularly beneficial for the socialization of (otherwise) religious homeschoolers.
I don't know of any studies (or if any could be performed, really) that demonstrate the social impact of public schools on students like this, or at least easily-identified outgroup kids. I know from anecdotal experience that in the public schools I attended that they (the semi-cultish religious kids who were not/no longer homeschooled) were not treated well, never successfully integrated socially, and disappeared from my radar very quickly after graduation. With hindsight I feel very badly about that now, and wish there some way to impact the systemic cliquish nature of public schools, especially high school. Unfortunately I lack a time machine for the kids of the past, and simply don't have answers for those going forward.
Either way, my suspicion is that public schools specifically do not offer the best (or even a much better) experience for socializing students.
It seems like you’ve achieved something great, congrats!
What are your estimated cost per year per child? (Including the aforementioned private teachers etc). It’d be interesting to compare that with the average expenditure per child in your local schooling district (it’s hard to compare directly due to hard to quantify factors like a parent staying home, but it’d still be interesting to see if it’s significantly more/less or not).
Thats a good question. I bet per child we are prob spending 2K-3K all told. Still way less than private school. Granted we also bring in a reading tutor and music teachers. But I am including all the camps and classes.
Where do you live? Can you do all these things (hunting, foraging, riding horses, karate, climbing, ice skating, etc.) without paying? Does that mean you live on a bunch of land? How far do you have to drive for these things? How did you find these meetup groups?
It sounds like a great setup, but it also seems difficult and expensive to me at first blush.
My kids are school-schooled, except for having learned to read at home. But they were in a music program that was popular among homeschool families, so we met a lot of those kids and their parents.
Based on that limited observation, I think that the socialism of homeschool kids depends on the kids and their parents in the same way as any other aspect of homeschooling: If the parents are reasonably social, they will find ways to get their kids involved in social things, and their kids will be social too.
If the parents are reclusive, or inclined to isolate themselves from mainstream society for whatever reason, this will also be reflected in their kids. What may seem like a negative outcome of homeschooling could just be a matter of kids resembling their parents. And it wouldn't shock me if genetics plays a role.
Oh man I have so many questions. I've been thinking about doing this one day myself but haven't been able to find good answers to the below.
How much time do you spend as a parent teaching or overseeing homeschooling? Are you encouraging your kids to go to college? And if they did want to go to college do they realistically have the option to pick the school they want? Any state or country requirements you need to adhere to in terms of curriculum? Have your kids ever expressed an interest in going to school? I can see homeschooling work well for disciplines like math or programming but have any of your kids expressed interest in something like medicine or law where prestige matters a lot? Are kids really self motivated to learn anything? How much structure do you impose? Do you find that they do more projects and experiments as opposed to reading theoretical stuff?
> How much time do you spend as a parent teaching or overseeing homeschooling?
Its a busy schedule for my wife, granted we have 3 kids. She also works part-time at their nature camp
> Are you encouraging your kids to go to college?
Depends. I plan on enrolling them at the local community college by age 14-15.
> And if they did want to go to college do they realistically have the option to pick the school they want?
I want them to attend community college then transfer, which is what I did and I transfered to a public ivy school
> Any state or country requirements you need to adhere to in terms of curriculum?
No requirements here in MI, depends on your state.
> Have your kids ever expressed an interest in going to school?
Nope.
> I can see homeschooling work well for disciplines like math or programming but have any of your kids expressed interest in something like medicine or law where prestige matters a lot?
Why would that matter? Top tier colleges are looking for/encouraging homeschool applicants because they are generally very independent thinkers and self-directed.
> Are kids really self motivated to learn anything?
Definitely. For example, my one daughter loves birds and is studying everything she can find about the local bird population. Kids are naturally very curious.
> How much structure do you impose?
This depends on the homeschooling family. We have a decent structure now but other families use no structure.
> Do you find that they do more projects and experiments as opposed to reading theoretical stuff?
50/50 I would say. They are still young so the reading is not like deep theory on anything yet.
He's not the guy behind the startup in the OP, he's just a guy doing homeschooling sharing his own personal experience. He's saying that at one point they went to Paris, which is a very educational think to do. That's homeschooling. Then they also studied Viking stuff. Maybe it was even in Norway at Viking sites? That sort of thing. A reasonable response to what do you do that Khan Academy doesn't which was the question asked of him.
Also how do you go about socializing them? I've been considering it myself