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“OK, my daughter loves Harriet Tubman. Tell me what you got!” she says. I explain our product, how we use historical women to teach girls about their worth and potential. The mother says: “But is it woke? I mean, I don’t want to teach my daughter about woke.”

And these people feel qualified to teach history.

It's not homeschooling, it's unschooling.

My parents were both teachers at private or Christian schools while I grew up, and every year, there'd always be a new couple of kids who's parents couldn't quite hack it anymore, so they'd send them to school. But couldn't bear to send their kids to those secular, godless, evolution teaching, sex driven, minority filled public schools, so they'd send them to my school instead.

Those kids were always some of the dumbest, most ignorant people on the planet. Some figure it out, but most don't. They just double down. They were usually barely literate, couldn't do math, and had no social skills. It's how you end up with a 19 year old freshman who can't read Dr. Seuss.

I know teachers aren't paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don't, and it shows.

When I hear a woman say "I'm not a feminist" my first thought is "WHY THE HELL NOT??"

“I do have one question, though ― do you teach feminism? I mean, I believe in equality, but I am not a feminist, and I don’t want to teach it to my daughter.”

I take the approach I used in Missouri.

“What do you mean?” I ask her.

“Well, do you teach that women are better than men?”

“No, I teach all genders are equal and should be treated as such.”

She buys three kits.

Jesus wept.

I homeschooled my kid k-12. When I started, I had no idea how many religious hs-ers there were. I used a secular curriculum, and never even thought about teaching anything regarding religion one way or another. Once I started looking around at all the creationist curricula out there--yikes.

Anyhoo, long story short, my son went on to a college degree (he actually started college classes online at 15--one of the perks of hs-ing for us), and he's an atheist. Secular homeschoolers do exist!

ETA some links--these are a few secular homeschool curricula. There's a lot more out there, but this is the majority of what I used through the years:

https://www.calverthomeschool.com/

https://www.oakmeadow.com/

https://www.keystoneschoolonline.com/

https://www.thinkwell.com/ (Primarily math--the professor that does most of the math instruction is wonderful.)

I've come to the conclusion that religious faith is a kind of mental illness that was made socially acceptable to keep primitive people from constantly killing each other, sticking instead to only occasionally killing each other within a vague set of guidelines.

Those of us free of it don't need an insane corkscrew of Escheresque logic and imaginary higher authorities using threats commanding us to not be monsters.

Americans' obsession with Jesus and the Bible is so weird.

My step sister is going to homeschool her kids, which will be great for her youngest since she named him Jedidiah. Shockingly someone who named their kid that stopped coming to family gettogerthers after my sister's kid came out trans.

She was sad she didn't get invited to my wifes baby shower, even if my niece wasn't planning on going I still wouldn't invite her because you can't just choose to cut out part of the family because you're a bigot and expect everyone else to still want you around.

I was homeschooled. I 'graduated' without a valid diploma and had to get a GED. I don't speak to my parents and my child is currently enjoying his day at public preschool. All my church friends who were raised similarly also are in similar situations. That's about all I'll say about it.

“Not all women are good,” he explains.

“Not all men are good,” I respond.

That's an amazingly pithy pair of lines

We had to pull my daughter out of her middle school and put her in an online school for reasons I don't wish to go into, but thankfully the online school is run by the county school corporation and she has a curriculum built by accredited teachers who are also there to talk to the kids by phone, videoconference or in person during school hours. And they are so receptive too. Suddenly I feel like educators care about my child.

But homeschooling? I would never even think of it. I don't know the first thing about pedagogy and neither does my wife. We did a less formal version of online schooling that was hastily put together during COVID while she was still in elementary school and it relied on me doing a lot of the teaching and I sucked at it. There's a big difference between being able to do fourth grade math and being able to teach a fourth grader how to do fourth grade math. A lot of those kids are getting so underserved by having parents, even well-meaning parents, who are not educators try to give their education.

And that doesn't even go into the "my son is learning to be a Christian as a homeschooler" bullshit.

There are definitely kids who would be better served by an alternative to regular public or private school, even school they can do from home. But educators need to be behind it, not parents. Not unless those parents have degrees in education.

Dumbass Christian Karens

I have often read sovereign citizen groups on Facebook, and they all "homeschool", which means the big kids babysit the little ones all day long, and sometimes CPS gets involved and removes the kids and terminates their parental rights because they realize the kids aren't getting educated and are having the shit best out of them routinely. I think homeschooling can be very dangerous for a child.

I worked at a homeschool public charter school for a few years. A good chunk of the parents were only in it because they wanted to use Christian curriculum and other conservative garbage to teach their children.

The school even had me go to a professional development event that ended up being a Christian leadership conference held at a church. One of my coworkers walked out once she realized it was religious and she was forced to use her PTO for the remaining days of the conference. I should have done the same.

Because a parent working, without any accreditation or training since they were a fucking literal child, totally sounds like a preferable route. Give me a fucking break, it's an assault on standardized education.

To make it worse, the kid will have a large drop in socialization opportunities and isolated relatively speaking. You just do not get that kind of social utopia ever again in your entire fucking life... the life experiences the child misses out on is significant. You can't schedule enough playdates to make up for that.

Every time I see articles in this topic, it just solidifies my opinion that homeschooling should not be allowed. We live in a community, and part of that means learning a common set of skills, social interaction with others in your community, and secular, science-based lessons.

Thank goodness homeschooling is illegal in this country. The best effect is that crazy nutjob parents are not able to install their delusions on their kids as much as they can in the US.

I think if you're going to be annoyed by stupid people, you probably shouldn't make stupid people a core part of your business model. I'm not saying everyone who homeschools their kids is stupid. Just most of them. Like nearly all of them.

I will say homeschooling can be a good teaching style.... With oversight. I am slightly biased because I was home schooled through the 7th grade. My mom wasn't a religion nut, I was homeschooled because the regular public school didn't have the to services for my IEP. So I went to a Charter home school program that had what I needed. To be honest I think I turned out far better than I would have at any regular school.

I was homeschooled (and I mean homeschooled, like, in the subculture) from Kindergarten through high school and am nominally a functioning member of society in spite of that fact. AMA.

We are planning to homeschool because school isn't liberal and woke enough.

Kidding aside, it's mostly because of the abuses of teachers, bullying, and school shootings.

I was homeschooled and it was fine, I did great on standardized tests, had friends, am not a fundamentalist nutjob, etc... I'd like to say to these people please stay, I know it's hard for them but what they're doing is desperately needed. Lots of those people are decent people who live in an echo chamber of conservative insanity, they need patient loving people like you to show up and let them see there's more to life than their bubble.

I grew up homeschooled for my entire K-12 experience through the 2000s and 2010s and went to my fair share of homeschool conventions throughout it. (They're really popular and they always have separate events for the kids.)

There's no governing body for any of these curriculum. My science education would always change depending on the book. At one point, I was told that all the animals in the world were vegetarian before Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil then turned carnivorous. Another series of videos I received spent a literal hour and a half "dunking" on evolution before actually giving a much more valid argument for its existence. (I actually am trying to find a way to convert the crappy flash swf files into video so I can share the insanity if anyone knows how to do that. FFmpeg hath failed me.)

Math was less volatile but had its quirks. I had one curriculum (Life of Fred) that quite literally was made with crappy clipart and not really even written by a person who was qualified to make kids content. It was just purposely obtuse and my mother took me off of it once I wasn't making any progress on it. I made it through two of those books for what it's worth.

Economics and "stewardship" was also high-key Republican trickle down economics and one time they actually blamed social programs for causing the Great Depression.

But, all that said, I got a super advanced education that put me well ahead of most other kids my age and I'm only listing the worst aspects of Christian homeschool curricula. Generally, homeschooling (Christian or secular) is almost entirely dependent on the parent actually giving a crap about their kid's unique needs and strengths. At the very least, if you're going to homeschool (no, I don't mean charter school) your kid for an extended period, make sure that you're involved with activities with other kids and that you really look through what your kid is reading.

Homeschooled kids are either geniuses or ignoramuses. There is no in-between.

Home school is bad because:

• what people learn isn't controlled by official requirements
• to teach kids properly one need special type of education themselves not parent who comes home at in the evening.
• there is no diploma so getting job will be like "trust me bro, ima best"
• socialization between kids is important.

That being sad US is weird in some of these aspects and they are not properly fullfilled even at schools.

We’re in Missouri again. We are selling a lot of product — in fact, we had our first mother and son make a purchase so he could learn about Sacagawea. It made me happy.

It makes me very happy too. I'm going to end my night with this thought.