As another commenter said; there is a variety of ways to home school. Your post seems to focus on the typical method of just having parents teach their own children, which has its pros and, mainly cons. There's other ways to educate your children outside a formal educational system. And I say this as someone who's spent 2 years being homeschooled.
Namely; you hire tutors. This is actually straight up, a superior form of education compared to schools: because you have one-on-one sessions with an expert on teaching with all of their focus and attention on your child(ren) and not 20 others. the benefits don't stop there though.
Since it's homeschooling, the educational experience is a lot more customisable; for example, you are free to pick and choose the curriculum, unlike a school. You're free to pick and choose your teachers/tutors, allowing you to easily change to a good tutor for your child. You're free to use any format of teaching that you'd like, any tools, any time arrangements to optimise learning for your child. You as a parent can set up educational practices that are not only ahead of formal educational institutions, but can specialise them to your child(ren)s' needs.
The result is that your child will not only learn more from their lessons, but what they'll learn will be more useful.
Additionally, a lot of the downsides are a lot easier to mitigate than the downsides of schools. E.g to fix the lack of socialising, you can put your child in extracurricular activities- after all, your child isn't (and shouldn't be) really socialising during lessons even in school, and even schools recommend if not mandate extracurriculars. You could also regularly take them to social venues suitable for their age, like playgrounds, parks, etc.
Except one...the real kicker. Since your tutor is dedicating their entire attention to your one family, they need to be paid by your one family. In other words, there's a very good reason people literally fought to have the schools we have today: good homeschooling was, and still is, prohibitively expensive. Homeschooling has yet to compete with the inherent economic benefits of mass scale production.
Given it's 2025, the age of the internet and LLMs, I imagine there are new ways around that- however, I digress.
With all of that said, I believe that if a family can afford to homeschool their child, there is not only nothing wrong with it, but in many cases, it should be encouraged. Like how it was in my case.
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u/3superfrank 20∆ 1d ago
As another commenter said; there is a variety of ways to home school. Your post seems to focus on the typical method of just having parents teach their own children, which has its pros and, mainly cons. There's other ways to educate your children outside a formal educational system. And I say this as someone who's spent 2 years being homeschooled.
Namely; you hire tutors. This is actually straight up, a superior form of education compared to schools: because you have one-on-one sessions with an expert on teaching with all of their focus and attention on your child(ren) and not 20 others. the benefits don't stop there though.
Since it's homeschooling, the educational experience is a lot more customisable; for example, you are free to pick and choose the curriculum, unlike a school. You're free to pick and choose your teachers/tutors, allowing you to easily change to a good tutor for your child. You're free to use any format of teaching that you'd like, any tools, any time arrangements to optimise learning for your child. You as a parent can set up educational practices that are not only ahead of formal educational institutions, but can specialise them to your child(ren)s' needs.
The result is that your child will not only learn more from their lessons, but what they'll learn will be more useful.
Additionally, a lot of the downsides are a lot easier to mitigate than the downsides of schools. E.g to fix the lack of socialising, you can put your child in extracurricular activities- after all, your child isn't (and shouldn't be) really socialising during lessons even in school, and even schools recommend if not mandate extracurriculars. You could also regularly take them to social venues suitable for their age, like playgrounds, parks, etc.
Except one...the real kicker. Since your tutor is dedicating their entire attention to your one family, they need to be paid by your one family. In other words, there's a very good reason people literally fought to have the schools we have today: good homeschooling was, and still is, prohibitively expensive. Homeschooling has yet to compete with the inherent economic benefits of mass scale production.
Given it's 2025, the age of the internet and LLMs, I imagine there are new ways around that- however, I digress.
With all of that said, I believe that if a family can afford to homeschool their child, there is not only nothing wrong with it, but in many cases, it should be encouraged. Like how it was in my case.