To disagree with home ed

@Freshton It’s interesting that you think it’s fine for disabled children to be HE despite thinking it’s massively disadvantages children and puts them at huge risk of an impoverished education and risk of abuse. If the average parent isn’t qualified to teach the average child why would they be qualified to teach a more complex individual?

Make the schools better and people will come.

Precocious readers do exist. My friend’s child was reading 5+ years material at 3yrs old, fluently. By the time she was in reception she was reading the first Harry Potter book.

if you’re saying you think home ed should be banned, YABU.

YANBU to disagree with people’s decisions and actions about their DCs’ education and parenting.

There are a lot of problems with the mainstream education system and parents are free to take decisions for our DC.

In most instances there are pros and cons for the DC with all the education options.

I’ve never home educated my children and I also spent ten years as a teacher. But I totally disagree with you. It’s a very fundamental building block of democracy that if you disagree with what the state wants to educate your child you have the right to withdraw them. Otherwise you can end up with situations like in Nazi Germany. Horrifying.

Agree. I know of a woman home educating her four children, aged 5 to 13yrs, and she also had a 3 month old baby now. She is not a qualified teacher and I also know that she is out and about quite a bit during the day, without her children, for other reasons. There is no way she is delivering a quality education to them. I feel really sorry for her kids.

I actually want to vote YABU.
I've known a lot of kids who were HE'd. At least for 12m, sometimes much longer. None of the kids I can think of had SEN. All grown up now.

I see drawbacks in how or what the kids experienced or learnt but they didn't turn out worse than School-ed kids. I am minded to predict that NONE of the HE kids will purposefully choose HE, though. One of them her own kids are nearly grown up & are conventional SchoolEd.

I decided that the supposed benefits of HE were exaggerated, specific drawbacks were under-valued, and their prejudice against school-ed wasnt' justified at all... so HE held no appeal to me. However, also want to say that none of the parents I knew who delivered HE were kooks, climate-change deniers, influencers on Instagram or unpleasant at all, really. One couple were creationists tbf. Their kids went to a creationist school from about age 10 maybe.

So I'm voting YABU. Extremists arent' representative of most HE.

Agree.

The fact you lie that a 3 year old could read “fluently” 😂 so you decided, nah, this one will be so bored he’ll disrupt the class, says it all.

What a wierd question. You do realise not everyone in adult life has office jobs in a large noisy building with disruptive coworkers? People who enjoy working on their own can do so eg trades people, lorry drivers, infrastructure engineers, farmers, wfh civil servants…. Indeed one might even ask how would school prepare them to cope in those roles?

A lot of weak parents who have kids then can’t actually parent use various excuses to claim
their kids won’t cope in school. When the reality is none of them can be arsed to get out of bed. By the time they’ve got up and dragged them round to Greggs there is little time left for “homeschooling”. When challenged they give the standard “ah but we’re not restricted to term time or school hours”.

I’ve watched Casually, ER, Doctors behind closed doors and am even old enough to remember Emergency Ward 10….but I’d never dare to take my child’s appendix out!
Teachers teach…parents parent.

I kind of agree. A lot of home ed feels like it's more about the parent than child.

I know of one home ed success however.. tho it's a weird story. He was home educated in a Plymouth Brethren environment, complete with redactions from standard texts. Against seeming odds he has grown up to be a delightful young man (and has a Cambridge degree), earns well and seems happy and well adjusted. My son, who is a good friend of his says it the young man did well in spite of, rather than because of the home ed.

And - redacted texts??? <shudder>

I home ed my 4 kids - they dont have SEN - although the reason I didn't send my oldest to school was because he was reading fluently by 3 and would have been so bored he would have been incredibly disruptive.
As it is he now holds down a full time job, my 14 year old has already completed her English gcse and is on track to have 6 more done a year in advance of her peers.
Just because it doesn't work for some doesn't mean it should be illegal.
I think the last time I checked, admittedly some years ago now, 1 in 3 children left uk schools without qualifications and we have a huge problem with antisocial behaviour in teens so school isn't doing a fantastic job either in a lot of cases.

I think home education is fine if it works for the family and children involved. However I do feel strongly that there should be some oversight to check on the kids, one that they are actually being educated (in whatever way works) and that they are safe. Of course the majority of home schooling families are good safe families but it’s also a great way to keep children away from outside influences and away from people they could tell (abuse).
I know some people disagree with this but I think it’s important.

I think there are two categories of home schooling parents and I have issues with one lot and not with the other.

There are undeniably children who have been failed by the school system and whose parents fpr whatever reason have withdrawn them. Additional needs, mental health, bullying or other problems. The parents then bend over backwards to help and educate their child in whatever way they can, they are engaged and connect with other homeschool families, organise things for their child and do their absolute best. Good on them, no issue with that whatsoever.

I do have an issue with parents who choose never to send their child to school in the first place, because that is about their ideology rather than putting their child first. Or parents who just want to be alternative or anti-establishment, or talk about how their child is too special or too precious to hand over to the "system".

Another thing I do want to point out is that many children who are home educated have SEN. This is due to the woeful lack of support or education in schools.

If you are home educating a child without SEN, it can be hard to fulfil them socially for that reason, so you have to join clubs and classes and not be so intent on only knowing other home ed families.

I have been sceptical about home Ed since someone I worked with told me they were home educating because their son didn’t like getting up in the morning.

I’m not saying I disagree, but school isn’t exactly an accurate reflection of the real world either. As an example, at my dc’s school they can’t remove blazers without permission and when they do have permission they can’t store them in their bags as they move around the school, they have to carry them. Reasons for this are unclear but you never get such nonsense in a workplace unless it’s something like the military which most kids won’t go into. In some schools kids have very little agency over themselves, which doesn’t help them become diligent, confident workers that take the initiative to solve problems.

I’d say it largely depends on the family that is home educating, whether they make the most of resources available to them etc. Some will be great at it and their children will turn out to be well rounded individuals ready for the ‘real world’, others not so much.

My DD has been home schooled for a year due to her SEN, anxiety and inability to cope with the mainstream setting. At only 7 years old she’s recovering from burnout.

We are slowly coming out the other side of it now and have obtained a specialist setting for her but due to the trauma of mainstream she is still too anxious to attend. We are desperate to get her back into an educational setting but it is a slow process. Mainstream settings can be very traumatic for children with SEN.

I think home schooling is more of a mixed bag than mainstream. Some are excellent and right for the dc, especially SEN as schools are not always good/right for these dc. But I’ve also seen a loving mum home school despite no qualifications herself. One I met was a trained primary teacher and clearly bright but my god was she smug, like her precious dc were more loved because she “sacrificed everything” for them. In contrast I work full time so you can imagine her view of me. I guess it’s a mutual dislike.

I met a few home ed families in my time of doing it where that wasn’t the case. The teen had a lot of outside interests - one was an army cadet who had a whole life there, off on camps, meeting friends from outside the HE world. Another was a drama kid, also off doing stuff all the time, residential trips etc.

But I did meet a lot of teenagers whose lives weren’t like that at all and it was very sad. They would be sat at home ed groups playing Lego with their ten year old “friends” looking like they had given up on life.

I home educated myself for years so I not against it, but man, people who do it are never honest about its drawbacks. It’s all, everything is awesome, when it’s not.

We moved to a city and put my son in school when he was 10, but before that, he was at a music/performing arts place every evening doing drama, learning musical instruments, all sorts from 4-7pm. He made loads of friends there (who went to school), who we would see on weekends and holidays, so he had a great life. I was looked down on for that by some home educated families as they didn’t want their children socialising with kids who went to school for some bonkers reason.

There are drawbacks to everything and HE does attract some weird people.

I imagine it’s very stifling and an insular existence for both the parent and child. Personally I wouldn’t want to spend every waking moment with my child and him me!

I’ve had a taste of home Ed during lockdown and it’s not something I would ever want to repeat. Trying to teach your own child is exceptionally difficult in most cases id say

Also school isn’t just about academics. It’s also navigating relationships with their peers, being able to resolve conflict, building friendships, building resilience and independence, being pushed out of your comfort zone etc

A lot of parents disagree with traditional schooling. Yet they don’t tell everyone who’s kids are in school how they’re abusing them.
Unless you have significant worries about a child’s safety (in which case report to social services or the police), minding your own business might be a good idea.

I saw a post yesterday of someone home educating their child saying they can’t get their kid off roblox to learn and was roblox educational. Like what?!

Isn’t it awfully intense on family relationships? It’s natural and instinctive for teens to pull away from the family unit. With home Ed they are stuck in the family dynamic.

Im sure some do it well and some have no choice (like my poor friend she just hires tutors she hates it so restrictive for them both). I know I would hate it. During Covid I only taught what I enjoyed. Also if you are no good at a subject yourself how do you teach it?