To think that home schooling is a bit cult like?

[WobblyWellies]

This is purely anecdotal but based on a group of friends who are all home schooling now, it makes me feel like there is a cult like element to it. There's definitely a click amongst the mums. One of my friends in the group has changed quite a bit since she started home schooling. She's almost become a bit militant about the whole thing. She often posts things on social media about how terrible schools are for children and how home schooling is much better. I feel like she's stirring things up. I am in fact a teacher but I don't push school on people I meet or social media, it's totally individual choice how you want your child educated. I'm not sure if my friend is out to convert people.

However, I do see homeschooling as a privilege to a certain extent because it relies on a parent not working (or part time) and is self funded for the majority. My friend has a house with acres of land and woods, she does loads of outdoor learning with her kids which is great but I wouldn't say it's the norm to have that.

So this group of friends are very clicky over homeschooling and it feels like a them and us scenario now.

Aibu to say it's like a cult for some people?

I do agree that there are plenty of anti-vaxxers in home-ed. But there are also plenty of people who went the other way, during covid.
Actually I found it a bit stressful trying not to offend one side or the other (not just in home-ed), generally during covid because everyone on all sides got a bit angry, shall we say.

I do know of someone who said "bad mummy" to someone whose child went into school... that was weird.

The LA reports/meetings are a whole topic to themselves. But there is a section of home-educators, encouraged by ex-home-educators who are very militant about LA dealings. Personally, I disagree with all of that nonsense. There's plenty of reasons why you might engage positively with your LA.

I used to call people on "school-bashing", it's unnecessary and pretty futile since it doesn't really solve anything. There's actually plenty of families who have some in and some out of school, and plenty fighting to get back in, so it's actually quite rude, imho.

There is a certain self-affirming thing (generally strongest in new home-educators - because deregistering is a really big decision and I get that).
But generally beyond that, home-educators who think they've achieved some kind of sainthood simply because they're home-educating - well that's all a bit cringey, as is the word "muggles" in relation to school-goers (although I actually think "sheeple" is far worse)

I do think it is a bonus being able to go to places during term time, though.

As I said home education is not better just different.

Much of the arguments seem to stem from one side or the other trying to insist that their way is better.

If everyone would just calm down and accept that others are entitled to do things differently, these arguments would not occur.

Sigh...

I home educate. We are not a privileged family, we live on a council estate and my husband works a minimum wage job.
The main reason I home educate is actually my own school education, my children deserve better.
We have incredibly low standards for teachers in this country, in some countries it is harder to become a teacher than a doctor. Here for many it is the back up because they messed up their degree.
I feel let down by education, so I follow curriculums which hold my hand a little. They have far more opportunities than they would in school. Including foreign languages, instruments, art etc. They are not housed, we do school 4 mornings a week and at 7 and 5, it never takes the full morning. They are leaps ahead of their school educated friends and family.

Also I feel it is a bit unnatural on a primal level, school is a relatively new thing.

I don't feel schools are really safe for girls, I think the statistic is 1 girl is raped at school every day.

They mix with home and school educated children and have no issues socially. They go to clubs with school educated children where some do struggle socially. School clearly isn't a magical place to raise well rounded kids. Some children who go to school struggle too, it isn't a home educated thing.

There are some cult-like vibes in the unschooling community near me so I tend not to mix with them. I went to a group once where there were lots of unschoolers and they certainly looked down on me for doing formal work. For the most part is normal people just trying to do the best by their children.

Oh bless you, do you honestly believe that children in schools have specialist maths teachers and specialist language teachers and specialist science teachers available to them on a daily basis?
we pulled our son from the top performing Academy because he didn’t have four out of the five course subjects teachers at all. Cover supervisors I believe they called them.

My son went to a selective grammar school and was taught history by a pe teacher with no qualifications in history when the history teacher left….

To be fair, you don't really need a specialist skillset to teach something like history, other than an ability to read and use a search engine.

Something like maths, English, the sciences, languages etc are the subjects where you need specialist teachers.

Yes we have issues and are judged because we do formal work and work towards gcses

You may well need them but you won’t get them necessarily 🤣

Wow. Is there any wonder we defend our choice to HE with so much judgement from so much of society? Really, is it ANY of your business?
As for 'do poor home ed children get a choice of going to school' I know many families who give that choice. How many school parents who could home ed give their 'poor school children' a choice to home ed? It works both ways.

you can sigh and deny all you like but everyone is not the same

abusive parents keep their kids at home on purpose you do realise @ElephantsintheCupboard

"We attended many different groups, from horseriding, to gymnastics, to folk dance, to meditation and evening art classes. We went to church and on church camps. We joined Guides and other clubs." (by @Apl )

@Trying20 I guess they are fairly middle-class activities, in the normal scheme of things.

But those activities are pretty typical for many home-educators, regardless of social class.

In home-ed, someone will say, "my child fancies, x, y, z - anyone want to join us?" because it makes it cheaper for everyone to do a group booking. So you end up with all sorts of people signing up for whatever it is.
Also, some things are easier to organise for home-ed partly because you'll likely have different age-ranges (and capabilities), rather than all within 12 months of each other.
So horse-riding, gymnastics, dance, swimming are easier to do than football and netball (where the participants need to be of a similar size and aptitude otherwise it can be horribly unbalanced)

Horse-riding, although on the more expensive end, is cheaper during term-time during the day, particularly on a group booking and where you don't have to have expensive pony club kit. So this opens it up to families that wouldn't necessarily be able to afford weekend/afterschool pony club prices.

For some reason, every home-ed group seems to have a mum who is into yoga or medidation and it's also one of the easier activities to do cheaply with mixed ages.

Home-ed trips are cheaper than school outings, too and obviously home-educators have more days available to them to go out. Which is why my children have been able to go to so many different places. We also don't have to cover a coach (they're notoriously expensive). So several of us went for the same price as it would have cost one child to go to the same place on a school trip.
But reeling of a full list of where we've gone sounds like the sort of list Eton or St Paul's would boast of in their prospectuses.

That's not to say that some people do stick to their socio-economic demographic, obviously that happens too, but it isn't a given.
To some extent, you can't help who your children makes friends with and often you're just so pleased and relieved that your children have found friends.

I think unless you live in an area where there is a huge home-ed population, you can't be that choosy. (Those areas do exist, of course, there's one town I know that has a massive amount of home-educators and a lot of them went to a particular church, so you can imagine how that would influence the local home-ed "scene" even if you weren't religious yourself)

Also, some of these activities aren't done every week, all year round.
You might only do a few weeks of something and then move onto something else.

Anyway, just to sort of try to explain why some home-ed activities look exclusively middle class when they might not necessarily be.

@Chillicheesebites

I don't feel schools are really safe for girls, I think the statistic is 1 girl is raped at school every day.

Do you have a source/link for this statistic please?

The statistic will come from here.
www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/All-Day-Every-Day-Sexual-violence-in-schools-legal-briefing-Sept-2016.pdf

My experience is that the home education community is quite divided.

A large group consists of parents of children with additional needs, usually but not always ASD who end up removing their children after schools fail then. There are key times when children sink and you see the patterns if you hang in home education communities long enough. The saddest imo are the large numbers that end up home educating in Year 10/11 after their child finally just won’t go to school anymore. This group are often raging about schools, resistant to the LA, their very negative experiences of the system play out for years after they’ve left.

Another group are the alternatives, the anti vax, breastfeeding forever, baby wearing sorts for whom home education is just another item on the ticklist of alternative parenting. Some of them are fairly mild, some full on cult, freeman of the land, flat earth sorts. This group are anti system in general and indeed they post the anti school memes between the anti vax ones on Facebook.

Then there is a small but persistent group of philosophical home educators. They often decided years before they had children that they would home educate. Their objections to the system are long standing but often they’re not otherwise particularly alternative. They tend to be parents who are themselves neurodiverse and had poor experiences of school. They also rely heavily on evidence. They’re not likely to be anti vax or flat earth sorts. This group will engage with the LA but only the minimum that is required generally,

Then there are the little groups
Religious home educators- small group in the UK but definitely exist, generally evangelical Christians or Muslims. Many but not all are more insular, tending not to attend non religious home Ed groups

The academics. This lot believe they can give a better traditional education to their kids than schools can. They tend to look down on other sorts of home educators although they do socialise with them and they mostly engage with the LA including permitting home visits.

The misfits- lots of reasons from waiting for a desired school place, to delaying school entry etc.

Then among the groups, you get more divisions between the full on academics, the electics, the unschoolers, the radical unschoolers.

Home education isn’t a cult because it has so many internal divisions.

Home education isn’t a cult because it has so many internal divisions.
@Hoowhoowho

Well, yes quite. 2 home-educators, 3 points of view.

There's almost no agreement in Home education. If someone suggests they "speak for home-educators" they're almost immediately shot down in flames.
(Or the person(s) wishing to speak for "all home-educators" blocks and bans their dissenters first)

Good luck anyone trying to organise home-educators into a cult.
It would be easier to herd cats😂

Your first point makes me think of the only home-Ed parent I've ever met. She is incredibly accomplished and intelligent, a little zany/eccentric but not to an unusual extent. Just a really interesting person. A bit of a hippy but definitely not the anti vax variety.

She home educated her children, and openly told me (with affection) that her children are "weird" - but she said that people often assume that her children are "weird" because they're home schooled. But she says the whole reason she began home ed was because they are "weird" and it became clear that they wouldn't fit in at school. I don't know if there were any diagnoses or conditions going on, I didn't pry. But by all accounts they seemed a very happy, high-achieving family.

So I just wonder if your friend may have been awkward because he was homeschooled, or homeschooled because he was awkward

Are they going to work for her too when they get older @Lunabun ? Does she keep the protective bubble of weird going forever?

HS was the best choice for my younger son, eldest son sailed through school no problems. Deregistered son age 13, he then organised and managed his own education, no outside help or online schooling, the information is all online, free. He sat exams as a private candidate and achieved really high grades. Now 17, been working part time for a year, a longside studying A levels. The self discipline and motivation he has acquired filters through all aspects of his life, re his fitness, diet, wellbeing etc. His mental health is very good, he is confident and articulate.
Alot of HE students have brothers and sisters that attend main stream school, and they do mix with all kinds of other children/teens, some of them have attended school at some stage.
There is no comparision between covid HS and HE. De schooling plays an essential part to the success of HE.
I felt a great deal of unwarranted judgement when l took my son out of school due to MH issues, so it is a huge relief and all credit to my son, (l am a lone widowed parent, l had to carry on working) that he made it work.

Homeschooling - fine.

Going on smugly all the time about how homeschooling is so much better than school and how your homeschooled children are so much happier and more well-adjusted and well-educated than children who go to school - not fine.

I'm honestly so conflicted.

I used to tutor for a HE organisation and the parents were without exception caring and invested in their child's well-being, and at the end of their tether by being failed by mainstream school. I think more or less every child either had SEN or physical illness meaning they couldn't thrive in mainstream school. (Of course, by definition, parents who choose to sign their children up for a structured educational course taught by a teacher are not going to be the hardcore antivax 'keep my children away from all that' type, or the neglectful type.)

On the other hand, my legal guardian pretended to home educate me as a cover for serious abuse and neglect, which was facilitated by total lack of any checks or safeguarding at all.

I've discussed my experiences several times on MN and every single time I get my arse handed to me, and am greeted with extreme hostility and basically people minimising or making up excuses for what I went through (like playing the "but kids who go to school get abused too" card, or confidently but VERY wrongly stating "there's not a single case of an abused HE child who wasn't previously known to social services", or again confidently but very wrongly stating "but HE children go out and are seen by lots of people eg dentists who can perform the same safeguarding duties as teachers, and if a child wasn't being regularly seen by a dentist and doctor that would be a safeguarding flag and someone would call SS" - the point is only HE kids from loving families do these things; kids being HE as a cover for abuse are not going to be joining HE groups or taken out, and a teenager not being seen by a dentist or GP regularly would certainly not be a flag for SS - who would even know if a teen was going to the dentist regularly??)

Some posters have just blatantly had the attitude "I would be happy for a child to be abused if it means I don't have to tolerate any intrusion into my rights over my child, I wouldn't tolerate even a once a year check I don't give a shit if it saves children from abuse."

That kind of attitude is terrying.

@Wouldloveanother well I don't know do I? I didn't interrogate her. She was just someone I had something to do with professionally for some time.

Though to be perfectly honest, when I described her as well-accomplished, that was probably downplaying it a little. Due to her position and the inevitable nepotism that follows, no I don't imagine for a second that her children are ever going to struggle for work.

@Hoowhoowho I really liked reading your comment and I think you've summed it up well. My friend (and friends linked to her) are definitely 'alternatives' in all the ways you've mentioned. I don't have a problem with any of these things at all but I don't like the fact my friend is being so militant. Thinking about it, she does the same with veganism and breastfeeding on social media.

@Hoowhoowho maybe your problem isn’t home educators but your friend constantly trying to convert you to her latest cause, how many other home educators do you know?