We upped-sticks to a more rural (and remote) area and are settled on homeschooling the kids. We run our own business from home so scheduling is not an issue.
Just want to hear the experiences of those who either were or have home-schooled: looking back, are there (institution-agnostic) issues you wish could have been done differently?
It’s definitely not what you asked, but I’m interested what the benefits are for homeschooling.
I have a friend who home-schools their kids but his reasonings are a bit counter-intuitive.
(I’m not here to convince you to do otherwise, I’m curious is all.)
We’ve generally done a mix of public school, bilingual, and international-ish schools. It’s worked for our kids but we did homeschool one for a period (he was hating his current school and needed a break). I think depending on personality (yours, kids’) it can be a good thing. If you have a child who is motivated and some $$$ for activities, it can be nice. When our kid did it, they did a lot of art and music and I gave them 1:1 time for math and they did science/reading pretty easily. I believe in this case they learned more than they would have in regular school. It also let us tweak travel and so it was not too disruptive for work/family life.
That said, I think it would be hard to do with multiple kids for years at a time. It’s also pretty common in the US–so no big deal if you’re going back–but seen as super weird in large parts of the world. You can probably take your homemade transcript and get your kid into a US college down the road, but not one in most other countries. We had a “reentry plan” with our kid, but I think that’s the thing I’d want to have prepared. If you want to put the kid/s back into school down the line, will you have the means to do so?
Out of curiosity, why are you doing it? Burned out on local schools? Religious reasons? Unschooling?
Not necessarily. Rural and remote areas can still have schools. OP can answer that one.
That’s only part of the answer. In very few places are there absolutely no schools, and of course they decided to move somewhere very rural. Most people have at least a few reasons (neurodivergent or special needs child, ideological/religious reasons, kid needs more time to play violin 8 hours/day, etc.). Just curious why they made the leap to homeschooling. In Taiwan, we did know a local kid where the mom homeschooled him to do test prep and then he went to local schools several days a week for different activities.
We never home schooled, but one of my kids did an online high school for a year during the pandemic. Based on how she did when she went back to our local high school in California, I think the academics were good. She suffered from lack of social interactions with other students, which was if course made worse by the pandemic. If we were to live in Taiwan short-term with a kid who didn’t speak Mandarin, that is the option I’d choose since I am not an awesome teacher. The program we did was expensive, but there are some cheaper options like University of Nebraska High school K13, etc. These are all US-oriented curricula, so not relevant if you are looking for Taiwan-based education.
In case you haven’t looked already, there is at least one English-language homeschooling group on Facebook, where you can find ideas and possibly speak with people or groups who are doing or planning homeschooling. Good luck! Sounds like a great adventure!
We have homeschooled for the last 3 years, now into our 4th, for our now 12 year old. Feel free to pm me.
Living in a remote area means getting the kids to school is inconvenient or unfeasible, or options are limited. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t any schools at all.
I’m not sure why you might think this reason insufficient. It’s not unusual to homeschool due to living in remote areas.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to sound judgy. I was just curious to hear more about it since it sounds like it’s a whole lifestyle change (family business, move to rural area, homeschool kids).
Trouble with Tribbles’s idea of online school sounds good, and it also makes sense to look at the homeschooling groups, since for many people an in-person/virtual homeschool group is one way to develop different skills or share the teaching load.
@DogmaticStoic , maybe you might be interested in this as you mentioned topic in separate thread.
Main concern I have for anyone who thinks homeschooling is a good idea is that your child is going to have limited social experiences and the only thing that prepares someone for social experiences is social experiences.
Going to school every day means interacting with peers and learning what it means to exist as a member of a wider community, for better and worse. It means learning to navigate bullying and making decisions about what kinds of friends one wants to have.
Homeschooling means the focus is on the child’s personal growth and academic skills. Without 20-40 peers in their classroom and possibly hundreds more in a wider real school, they miss out on the opportunity to learn how to be in a group through homeschooling. This is ok to an extent for some kids but doesn’t consider the child’s future as an adult. Existing in the wider world is not about being good at academics or whatever skills and knowledge you personally know and have developed — it’s about being a member of a wider society and contributing to it with the skills you have, which inherently require group work and interpersonal skills, which humans have traditionally developed by interacting with “the village” since the dawn of human civilization. I know lots of people say things like “well they’re way better at…” or “other adults find them to be very mature for their age”. That’s great for when they’re smart and brilliant little kids, but how are they going to interact with other adults when their age is also “adult” and there’s nothing impressive about being a know it all after a kid graduates preschool? Eye rolls, “this person is really awkward”, etc.
Homeschooling these days also feeds straight into the “loneliness epidemic” problem. Everyone is staring at their screens all day, getting carefully curated information based on their own personal preferences, instead of being in the same physical location as and interacting with other human beings. Going to a physical school means a student has the opportunity to hear other information and learn from other people in ways that the computer and a child’s PhD-holding parents cannot help with.
Obviously OP has moved to the sticks, but the point of my rambling is that if you’re not having your kids interacting with other kids their age and in environments outside of your control, you’re doing a disservice to their social development. After the age of six, the social being that is a human child needs to get out of the house and leave the family unit and experience the wonders and horrors of the world for themselves. Sheltering them from the “bad”, like “not getting along with their peers” (especially when their parents were bullied themselves as children) only leads to crippling anxiety in young adulthood due to having never faced basic struggles of being a young human, like telling someone to stop doing something that bothers them or asking for help finding something in a store. These things take practice and constant opportunities, so if you’re going to homeschool on the academic front, make sure you have something to make sure their social development doesn’t suffer.
Nonsense. There are tons of ways to socially interact with others. It takes a bit of work to do so, but it isn’t as difficult as people make out.
It also assumes that the socializing in school is somehow a microcosm of how society functions, when this is far from the case. Taiwan’s schools are a perfect example of this.
This is the exact reason I didnt comment in the first place, and asked the OP to DM me.
I agree with you. My school was more of a microcosm of how prison works: Central unelected authority figure overseeing everyone and dishing out punishments and assigning you tasks without immediate monetary rewards other than “perks” for good behavior.
It didn’t resemble actual society at all.
Sounds like capitalism in a nutshell and therefore exactly what the wider world looks like.
To be clear, I do not support traditional education, which I’m sure you know from my many posts. But homeschooling (not having children interacting with their peers for 6+ hours of almost every day) is not a solution. It’s a way for parents with the means to look after their own child make sure their own child gets what they think their child needs while ignoring the wider societal problem of traditional education sucks for everyone. It’s also incredibly selfish, making sure your child gets what you think your child needs while scoffing at the children in the prison of traditional school. Rather than thinking about how to make the wider society better, it’s about looking out only for oneself. All while sheltering the child from the world outside, including their peers, and implying, whether explicitly or indirectly, that they are better than everyone else because they’re not in a traditional school.
Yes, and it could provide opportunities to develop peer groups for the kids and schedule group educational and social outings.
Why are you answering on behalf of the OP? Or are you the same person?
Most of my fond memories are from school, and basically all of them were getting into all sorts of trouble. It’s how I made my friends and how they met their partners. My career didn’t come from my education at all but I owe a lot to the experiences I had there.
Can’t do that with canned experiences arranged by the parents. School was getting away from the rest of the family for me.
That is your experience, sure. My experience of school was very different. Most of my friends were just met from my neighbourhood, not from school. Or from my personal interests.
And why do experiences that aren’t in a school format become “canned”? Kids can still be kids if they are meeting up at a schoolyard to play/hangout, or on a sports team, or do things together in whatever form they choose. Kids can still do all of the things that you are saying away from school. I think this has a lot to do with people’s preconceptions of what homeschooling entails (ie hover-parents with money with high achieving children), which is often not the case at all.
In my experience, there are a lot of parents of children with learning disabilities that end up homeschooling as well - primarily because there is no funding or support for the non-violent, but equally learning disabled kids.
I was commenting on your question.