I would not say “often” better academically. It’s up to the resources the parents have. Poor families doing homeschooling end up poorly educated, wealthy educated families are more able to educate. Humans already did this up until the advent of modern public education systems.

In a public school, the idea is that both the rich family and the poor family are offered the same education, and this is better for society as a whole. I will agree that public education isn’t perfect and could be improved in almost every way, but opting for private education is leaving your child’s future up to random chance as dictated by your social status.

At some point you will try to socialize your homeschooled kid. If you live in a rough community where drugs, gangs, and teen pregnancies are relatively common, you won’t be able to avoid the same influences you’re trying to avoid in public schools. Except now it will be all they know.

IMO exposure to a larger population of people in a public school gives kids more reference for all the kinds of people in society, and control over who they want to interact with. Then it’s the parent’s job to make them feel empowered (not pressured) to make the best choice they have available.

I was homeschooled K-12 and never went to college, so home school is literally all I know and I have thoughts.

1. Motivation matters - I was home schooled for religious reasons by parents who were themselves educated but wholly unqualified to teach a single child much less 4 kids. They homeschooled us primarily to avoid the indoctrination of the secular world, where the lies of evolution and gay baby killers reigned supreme. Thus, I was not well educated and didn’t realize it until I got into the work force. I have been battling crippling imposter syndrome ever since I realized how deficient my education was - I’m still in the process of understanding the scope of that deficiency
2. oversight is not optional. In my situation, we were homeschooled without any government involvement or oversight in any way. My parents told me at the time that this was how the laws in my state worked but they also told me to stay away from Truant Officers so I think they were lying. I had no sense of equivalency or where I stood compared to my peers until I was in the process of testing out to get my GED (because weirdly, prospective employees weren’t keen to accept the “diploma” my dad had printed from MS Word) that I saw my percentile rank in various subject
3. Unless you are an educator, don’t try to run a curriculum. If you’re going to homeschool, pay a tutor. If you can’t pay a tutor, probably don’t home school

I know that last bit sounds extreme and I don’t think my home school experience is typical so take it with a grain of salt.

Edit: none of this even addresses the social impacts, which are intense if not mitigated with a lot of sports and group activities, etc

Homeschooled kids do things like base their opinions on, “I have heard” instead of citing empirical proof from rigorous sources.

Depends on the parents. Lotta nutjobs and alot of lazy people and both amount to kids getting an inferior education. But committed to putting in the work, with the time to due so, and good resources in your community to assist you, because you’re unhappy with the quality of public education and/or the amount of propaganda kids are forced to sit thru? Good for you, home school away.

It’s banned in a lot of European countries AFAIK.

Should be banned in every country with decent public education. Unless you have a formal education background you have no business formally educating anyone. Everyone has stories of things their parents taught them that turned out to be total bullshit and they only found out because they went to actual school.

We all know the homeschool kids are the weird ones. But being honest, I totally get that some kids might benefit from a year of homeschooling if they’re struggling socially. Everybody’s different yeah, not everyone fits into the same box.

I think its a better than nothing kind of option for some families living in remote places or living very itinerant lifestyles

But in general, I think its just a way to for parents to keep their kids as indoctrinated into their fucked up beliefs as they can.

Also, growing up I knew many homeschooled kids through boyscouts, and they were almost always socially stunted, and often intellectually behind because their parents were barely teaching them anything.

Then you’ve heard wrong.

An excellent form of inculcation.

Generally negative.

i feel homeschooling marked me for life as an unsociable person.

every homeschooled person i know has expressed similar dismay.

i wish my parents public schooled me and put the efforts they put into homeschooling into giving me a decent home life, rather than being exhausted all the time.

i was decent at math and that was my saving grace. my siblings are dumb as rocks. we were considered smart at our homeschool co-op. one person i knew couldn’t go to community college because they couldn’t pass remedial classes.

a lot of my classes were useless nonsense - i wasted a lot of time on religious history and Latin.

a stable homelife with a solid education on avoidable pitfalls, life planning, assistance finding out what passions to chase and how to get there, and putting money towards college rather than homeschooling would far outweigh any benefits, if any, that homeschooling offers.

if “peer pressure to do drugs” is such a concern for a middle schooler, i can guarantee you that its going to be worse for a homeschooled kid becoming an adult and escaping helicopter parenting.

Most homeschool teachers have no business raising kids, let alone teaching them.

I’d have had an unarguably better life if I’d gotten into drugs with my friends in middle school. Which is to illustrate that I’m an outlier. Homeschooling sets your children up for failure. Most homeschooling programs out there are flat out bad. If you decide to do it, contact your local school district for reliable curriculum. They (professional educators) can point you in the right direction far better than the internet.

Homeschooling is a great way to completely fuck up your kids. My wife and I both have Masters degree so we consider ourselves well educated, but we have always recognized that we do not have the depth and width of knowledge that our kid needed to exposed to. Also we always recognized that teaching requires dedication and skill sets we do not have.

I am not even going to comment on the lack of socialization the kid will miss out on.

The only reasons any parent home schools a kid is because the parents are wack jobs or terrified.

I’m talking from a US perspective, but I work in an education adjacent field that reviews a lot of homeschool student’s academic records from across the country. IMO, there are two types of homeschoolers. There’s the students who are truly brilliant living in a part of the country that doesn’t value education, and they’re practically forced into homeschooling (or a popular online program like Stanford Online High School) in order to receive an actual education that could challenge them. They do get less socialization than their traditional schooled peers, but they’d get mercilessly bullied at a traditional school so it’s hard to say how much value that socialization has.

The other type are the religious fundies. I have even more hands-on experience with this style, as some of my cousins were homeschooled in this manner. IMO, this shit should be illegal. It’s accepted because someone is typically monitoring these students’ academic progress, but I can say with confidence that Republican states are letting a lot of shit slide. It’s religious indoctrination at a level beyond what you would even find at a religious private school. Typically, these students are better socialized than the other homeschool students, though with the caveat that all their socialization happens in religious settings.