In addition to being pastors, my parents were both also professional teachers. My mom has a master’s in education.
I still wish I wasn’t homeschooled.
Like, I run into folks now who get super excited when I tell them I was homeschooled because they’re thinking about homeschooling if they ever have a kid and want intel, and they get super grumpy and dismissive and defensive when I tell them how absolutely debilitating it was socially, and that it really wasn’t worth it just to be a year ahead in math.
And part of that is this sense that homeschooling is an opportunity for you to customize your child. It’s usually an extension of a broader fantasy that that’s what parenthood is about. That you can minmax your child’s stats and construct the perfect build, and the only reason everyone’s all screwed up is just that nobody sat down and really micromanaged their child’s education enough. Other teachers (and peers, for that matter) might steer them in directions you don’t want.
Even when done well, homeschooling is about removing those outside influences so you can control their environment and prioritize your own goals for them. It’s a magnet for people with narcissism and control issues as a result, it’s a magnet for fundamentalists, but it’s also a magnet for idealists. Sometimes it even works out great, hell, there are people who for accessibility reasons will likely be taught far better at home. But that’s more a “lesser of two evils” situation.
One person cannot be smarter in every single subject than every single teacher that the kid would ever have. They can’t singlehandedly replace the socialization, the networking, the mentorship, and the life experiences. And to think that they can borders on megalomania.
[Image ID: tweet by @FirstGentleman: Y'all are not smart enough to be homeschooling children /end]
