Question for Home Schooling Kids

[cookderosa]

It might be a "freakanomics" thing, where more kids who don't fit in end up being homeschooled, making it look like more homeschooled kids end up "weird" - but really, they were always having problems, the issues were there BEFORE the homeschooling began, homeschooling didn't CAUSE them.

That's an excellent point!

[ladylearner]

Love it!!!! As a second gen homeschool parent, I couldn't have said it better than either dfrecore or cookderosa, so I won't try.

Just wanted to chime in and say that both of their perspective are very accurate from what I've seen over the last 40 years or so -- when I was homeschooled, and now that I have been homeschooling my own children, some of whom are in their late teens & early 20's.

Seriously, "socialization", or what the general population means when they say it, is typically not an issue for true/dedicated homeschoolers in my experience.

I completely agree. A good friend who is a special ed teacher has a very low opinion of homeschooling. Yet she doesn't know a single homeschooling family. Not one. She has some of the usual stereotypes - no socialization, weird kids, weird parents, behind academically. I don't homeschool but I know many who do and it works well for them. It bugs me when people make snap judgments without knowing anything about who or what they are judging.

[dfrecore]

I completely agree. A good friend who is a special ed teacher has a very low opinion of homeschooling. Yet she doesn't know a single homeschooling family. Not one. She has some of the usual stereotypes - no socialization, weird kids, weird parents, behind academically. I don't homeschool but I know many who do and it works well for them. It bugs me when people make snap judgments without knowing anything about who or what they are judging.

I know people like this too. They make a generalization about an entire community of people based on 1 or even 0 people they personally know! Makes no sense.

If you don't know anyone who homeschools personally, and just have vague ideas about it, I'm not sure where your opinion comes from at all.

If you know ONE family who homeschools, then you're judging 1.8M kids by ONE family. If you were mugged by a person from Nebraska (a state of 1.8M people), would you say that all Nebraskans are muggers? If you got into a car accident with someone from West Virginia (a state of 1.8M people), would you say that everyone from WV is a bad driver? Yet that's what you do when you say that all homeschoolers should be judged by the single instance you met a single homeschooler. It's beyond stereotyping or generalizing.