The common trope is that homeschooled/unschooled kids are generally really weird and fucked up, and from my experience this is pretty accurate. Most of these kids lack any kind of healthy or substantial social circle, which to the credit of the Common Core education system, even though it is hell bent on brainwashing the goycattle at the very least it provides people with plenty of opportunities for social interaction.
Social Interaction, and a lot of it, is especially crucial during the ages of 10-13. This is an important period for most people to develop social skills and a somewhat decent sense of identity. Homeschooled kids, in lacking this social development, end up going off on all these weird rabbit holes because they lack this foundation, and generally lack a foundation of basic thinking and education based skills.
To be fair to the point, I don’t think Unschooling or Homeschooling is bad by itself, I’ve certainly seen a lot of people end up alright, but they are the exception. But for most parents it’s pretty much just like gambling with your child’s psychology and hoping that everything will turn out alright.
The kids that make it through have some sense of discipline or community. While the ones who don’t make it through are left to their own devices, often emulating all of the shitty cultural phenomenon that occurs in our modern dysfunctional society.
And if we’re going to be even more fair, lets not pretend like Common Core Education produces Chads and Stacies. Most people drop out, get a GED, cheat their way to a diploma, or are granted a free ride because the schools are so oversaturated by retards that if they don’t pass a certain amount of people the schools will be overflowing and taxing an already strained system.
The solution is to adapt, synthesize all the elements of education that work and discard the elements that don’t.
A healthy community I think ought to educate its children with first hand experience. Children should shadow their parents. They should have plenty of access to hobbies and the like (Martial Arts, Dance, Music), and they should learn basic language and math skills in a setting that encourages real world application of these skills.
Maturity is forged through experience. Therefor, if their experience is lacking in one way or another, that will be demonstrated in their life outcomes, and in societal outcomes.
This is probably key. I had a friend who was homeschooled, though he went to a private Christian high school. He had several siblings older and younger also homeschooled. Pretty sure they had a community b/c their Church, and living in the same area. He was smart and motivated. I got the sense that he was sheltered, but I think when I met him he had more freedom and was becoming a little rebellious in our late teens. Homeschooling usually happens within a rigid religious context and I suspect he had to “walk on eggshells” being friends with us public school heathens.
I hadn’t kept in touch with him but I believe he also went to a small, private Christian college. Also, from what I remember him and a few other “sheltered” friends were not working summer jobs when I was, in high school. I thought this was surprising but I think their families were just slightly more upper middle class or more “genteel” so they didn’t stress working menial jobs.
I don’t think I have anything useful to offer on education. Most of it comes from parents as they shape the environment at home and at a separate school or social sphere. The rest can be helped along by schools and teachers and work, play, etc. Iirc my buddy even dealt with some “diversity” in his high school which he likely did not deal with prior to. But we all know public schools in cities big and small are diversity dumpsters that create fight/flight environments that produces bad outcomes.
Every. Stray.
A pattern is forming!
This was largely my experience growing up as well. It made intuitive sense even back then that when you would meet a homeschooled kid that they were probably going to be maladapted. And the underlying instinctive reasoning felt something like “do your parents not realize that they’re supposed to send you to school with other kids your age?”
Back then, as an adult and parent, you would have had to have had some pretty elite prescience to detect that the overall quality of public school was declining rapidly and was setting your kids up to develop into goycattle as it were. It feels like we just didn’t have the awareness and depth of communication channels to proliferate that knowledge back then. I don’t know how an adult person prior to the year 2000 could have become ‘based’, where would they have found this education? We just didn’t even have a long enough time horizon for that sort of thing. Yet.
In reality most of the parents back then that weren’t sending their kids to standard schools weren’t on the right side of the bell curve, who understood how the mid curve functioned and wanted to get ahead of it. They were on the left side. They were weirdos, wackos, delusional, emotionally/mentally/socially maladapted themselves, completely out of touch with reality and susceptible to all kinds of grifts, scams, cons, and so forth because they simply didn’t have the intellectual defense mechanisms to know any better. For every one Uncle Ted we got who could presciently write Industrial Society and Its Future we probably had 99 tinfoil hat wearers blowing all their money on miscellaneous anti-reptilian household defense contraptions and were essentially anthropomorphic broken clocks. Maybe were right about one thing or two, but by complete luck and chance. There was no coherent reasonable mental model of the world that could justify their decision to homeschool. I could be wrong, but this is just my speculation and suspicion as to why these kids turned out so dysfunctional. Their parents didn’t know something the rest of the public school parents didn’t. They knew even less than the public school parents about how the world worked.
I do think with todays ecosystem, there’s enough knowledge out there (and mechanisms to administer knowledge) that simply didn’t exist a few decades ago. There are such obvious indications that our conventional education system doesn’t work (trans degeneracy, DEI, longhoused teachers/administrators, political propaganda in the curriculum) that homeschooling your children, or more ideally schooling within a shared community of likeminded parents, seems like not even just a choice of luxury but common sense defense against the cognitohazards of the postmodern hellscape we live in now.
But at my current age, I know very few parents with children at all let alone old enough to begin their formal education, conventionally or otherwise. I am very curious to see and hear about what this new generation is doing and will do.
I’d also be curious to know if anyone here has had any experience with Montessori or the Waldorf school.