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by cldellow
2388 days ago
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It might vary by location. I grew up in rural British Columbia and homeschooled for a year due to a family feud with the local grade six teacher. The other homeschooled kids I interacted with were homeschooled for religious reasons or so they could help on the farm. They were poorly socialized and poorly educated as best as my then eleven year old self could tell. |
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I was homeschooled for a while and saw a lot of the other homeschooling families via the school district resource center thing, which even the real extremists interacted with at least some. From my perspective, it was broken into three major groups: religious conservatives concerned with the moral purity of their kids, upper-middle class professionals interested in accelerating their kids as much as possible, and a grab bag of students from various socioeconomic stripes who'd had trouble with the standard school system for various reasons.
I was one of the second. My mom has advanced degrees in education. My dad's an attorney. I did fine, as did basically everybody else in that cohort. Even then, the impression my friends and I had was that the religious kids spent an awful lot of time on literal bible study and weren't so hot on "actual" education. These suspicions were borne out when it was time for the state standardized tests they wanted homeschooled kids to take - every kid from the second of those cohorts (and many from the third) blasted though them, while those from the first visibly struggled. The religiously-motivated cohort also managed to out-weird a bunch of kids who spent much of their time on mid-2000s 4chan as young teens, which is actually pretty impressive.
Anyway, I agree that the reason a student is homeschooled (and by proxy the resources and pedagogical methods available to them) is a much better predictor of overall outcomes than a simple homeschooled/not binary. When there's such significant clustering in a category, trying to make judgments only utilizing knowledge/stereotypes regarding the category as a whole is a good way to be misled.