We both went to public school back in Upstate New York. I went to a huge school that had about 700 students per grade and Doug's school had only about 100 students per grade. We are no noobs when it comes to public school! When we had children, we knew that we were going to homeschool them. We made a list of 10 reasons why we homeschool. There are more, but here are just 10:
1: Bullying
There is a LOT of bullying that goes on in the public school system and we simply don't want our children exposed to that. Bullying is a terrible thing to happen to anyone, especially children. It can totally ruin a person for a long time, even for life.
2: Bad Influences
There are a lot of public school students who are bad influences, and no matter how good your child is, some bad habits could be picked up by them. It could be swearing, bad music, wanting to dress a certain way that we don't agree with, drugs, etc.
3: It's Our Responsibility
We feel like for us, it is our responsibility to teach our own children and not push it onto other people.
4: Public School Has Different Values
We have values, and the public school system just doesn't match ours. We don't like how it is set up or how it functions.
5: We Don't Let Anyone Watch Our Children
We don't trust people watching our children, which is why we have never had a babysitter. So shipping our children off to public school to be with bus drivers and teachers who we don't know all day is not something we are into.
6: Better Education At Home
Contrary to popular belief, we feel that we can give our children a better education at home. We can help our children one on one. In a public school classroom there are 30 students and rarely does each student get one on one help. Each child learns different ways and at differing speeds and at home you can cater to that. In a public school, students are forced to try to learn the same way.
7: We Hated Public School!!
Since we both hated public school and dreaded going there each day, why would we send our children to a place that we hated?
8: We Know Exactly What Is Being Taught
If we were to send our children to public school, we wouldn't really know what they are being taught in each class all day. There are many things that are taught in school as fact that should not be.
9: Spending Time With Our Children
Since we homeschool, we spend the entire day together. We are a family that likes to always be together so sending our children to public school just doesn't work for us.
10: Public School Could Cause Social Anxiety
This is obviously debatable. I have read online about how people feel about homeschooling and something I see consistently is that "children need to go to public school to be socialized and if they are homeschooled, they won't know how to interact with others and will be anti-social". As I said earlier, Doug and I both went to public schools for our entire schooling years. Neither one of us are good at social situations, so going to public school didn't help. In fact, we feel like it made us worse at being social. I am extremely shy and awkward and I feel like it is mostly caused by how weird and embarrassing school was. I hated doing speeches in front of the class, which unfortunately seemed to be all the time. That is what I hated most about school. Public school is an unnatural setting and it does not help with socialization. Our daughter has been fully homeschooled and is super social to children at stores and the playground. She is not shy at all. She goes up to children and they either ignore her or run away from her, and it's a pretty good chance that those children attend public school. This is just our experiences and observations and is also based on other adults we know of who went to public school who are also socially awkward.
If you are planning to move and want to homeschool, keep in mind that each state has different homeschool laws. In the US, homeschooling is legal in all 50 states, however some states make it extremely hard for you to do so like New York, Vermont, and Pennsylvania. Some states are very free and make it easy to homeschool like Indiana, Missouri, Texas, and Idaho. Here is a map from https://www.hslda.org/laws/ for a visual:
We were asked by TheTexasBoys to be a part of a collaboration on Youtube to talk about why we homeschool and how we homeschool. In the video we go over these 10 reasons and we also talk about homeschool curriculums.
TheTexasBoys Youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkns4vMbwYwinCrZX8JwAig
TheTexasBoys Steemit - https://steemit.com/@texasboys
I agree 100% with your reasons for home schooling. I spent my first 5 grades in a catholic school, then the rest in public school. Eventually dropping out a year before graduation. I believe the public school system is set up to stagnate free thinkers and teach students to be complaint to authority figures.
My grandmother was a community school teacher. Each community paid for the teacher, the curriculum, and built the one room school house or used the community church during the week. She stopped teaching some twenty or so years after the public school system was established.
If I had known back when my kids were about the age to start school I would have chosen home schooling over public or privet schools.
Thanks for posting! And keep doing all your doing.
I agree with you about the public school system. Basically it's a 13 year training facility so that when students graduate and get jobs, they take orders willingly and don't have a free mind. I wanted to drop out so bad but somehow managed to push through and graduated. Thank you.
I went to private school but my experiences were similar to what you described. The conventional school system is unnatural and a relatively recent invention. Go back 100 or 200 years and "education" looked completely different. It looked more like homeschooling and it was done that way for thousands of years.
You can't make a fish climb a tree, and you can't learn in an educational format that hasn't changed in almost a hundred years.
Prince EA Sues The School System. If you haven't seen it yet, I would highly recommend doing so.
Yep, totally unnatural setting that has somehow fooled most people into thinking it is necessary and great. Luckily more and more families are deciding to homeschool these days.
This is great info, if I had children of my own I would definitely homeschool! Resteemed
Thank you!!
Do not have time to read this right now but I know it will be good so I am resteeming now too - that will remind me to catch up when I have a few!
Have I said yet how glad I am you two are here? :D
Thanks for resteeming! I'm glad you like us being here. :) We haven't been good at writing frequently on here yet. I've never really been much of a writer, but I'm trying!
We are home schoolers as well! More folks need to start home schooling. Maybe your post will open some eyes.
Yes, more people should start homeschooling, and more states need to become more lenient and not make it a hassle to homeschool. Luckily we live in Indiana where it's a piece of cake...no notices, no testing requirements, no submitting evaluations, etc.
Both my husband and I were teachers, so not only did we go through the school system, we got to be part of it and see the often dirty underbelly, too. If our own experiences in school weren't enough to convince us, our time as teachers certainly put the nails in the coffin of ever sending our kids to school if we had the power to teach them ourselves!
My best students were always those who were transitioning from homeschool-to-"normal" school. They knew how to speak to adults (an increasingly rare skill??), they had their own identity, they didn't always fit in (not a problem, in my book), and they handled their own learning with a sense of responsibility that a lot of my other students lacked. It was hard to watch them struggle in the often vicious social environment of middle school. Some prevailed and got a little tougher, some went back to homeschool, and others lowered their standards and became part of the cliques.
Middle school is where it all went downhill for me, socially speaking. What subjects did you both teach?
I taught environmental education to preschool through 8th grade, then I was a middle school language teacher (Spanish and Latin). My husband was a science teacher to high school (Chemistry and Biology).
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