Apparently one of the kids went to somewhere in Europe for her honeymoon... Her education left her so well prepared for the world that she was completely baffled by foreign things like fondue and... sparkling water.

It just seems like it depends on what the parent wants the kid to become.

The only people I've known to dedicatedly homeschool their children despite any outside forces such as jobs getting in the way were secular antivaxxers, like anti-vax before covid.

We won't pretend like there's no issues in religious homeschooling (obviously) but we also shouldn't pretend like there's no issues in secular homeschooling either.

(I say dedicated homeschoolers because I do know those who had the spouse free to homeschool or friends that would do so if they could economically. I know people who still prefer at home traditional schooling for their kids now since it become an option. But you know. Those that would quit their jobs without adequate support from their partners income just to homeschool their kids)

Yep, it's been going on for years and liberals (or whatever you want to call us - good or bad) feel like we have been screaming into an abyss. I'm old and tired. Not sure how long my friends and I can continue and we make no progress. We are in Florida.

You can teach them those things yourself though. I agree that public education is under attack, but as a parent you can supplement as long as public school curriculum is only omitting important things (and they obviously always are, because they are teaching to a commonly agreed upon pool of knowledge that is never going to include everything your kid should know) It’s only a serious problem if they are teaching untruths as fact and doing it extensively. Which is what far right homeschoolers perceive to be happening in public school.

Homeschooling makes sense when you think public school is teaching your kid a lot of things that are wrong AND you don’t want them to develop the habit of questioning the knowledge they are given. You don’t want then to be in the habit of thinking about what they learn and deciding what is true. You have to both disagree with what they’ll be taught and not want them to hear that people can have other opinions.

My kids had teachers with a far right bias who told them all sorts of horseshit as “fact” but they weren’t harmed by that because they brought it home and discussed it with me, and with their friends and with other teachers. They learned how to sift through bullshit to form and strengthen their own opinions. My kids had a solid foundation from me that was improved by everything they heard from their various teachers, right and wrong, because all of it taught them to think and question and seek out information and come to independent, well thought out conclusions. I will agree though that if I lived somewhere where everything they taught my kids was patently wrong, homeschooling would have more appeal, but I doubt that’s often the case, UNLESS you think a huge number of things our culture accepts are “wrong”. (Like racial and sexual equality, man’s place in nature, the role of government in legislating sexual freedom, bodily autonomy and sexual identity, etc)

If your goal is simply to create unthinking people who do as they are told and never question your worldview, you don’t expose them to anyone else’s views whether you agree with them or not. You seek out curriculums that echos your “alternative” worldview and you never suggest to them that there are any other valid opinions on the matter. Ie: you homeschool them.

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I get involved with kids like this at the college level and that's exactly the sort of "difficult to bridge" gaps in learning that I see across the board. I spoke to one kid years ago after he was kicked from his university class for repeatedly copying from others on tests and even worksheets. I'm not sure, but it seemed like he'd never produced work on his own, his entire educational career to that point. He was homeschooled and the parent would apparently mostly do the work and then he'd just copy it. I guess they thought he'd absorb it by copying it, but what he absorbed was the idea that he'd just always be expected to copy. The idea of knowing enough to actually produce something himself, instead of just copying someone, seemed foreign to him. I don't know how to help a kid who has so fundamentally missed out, but he dropped out so I don't know what would have happened had we tried. I hope he got a job somewhere, but I don't know how.