Insane rise in home schooling?

[whyohwhy246]

Has anyone else noticed a huge increase in home schooling? Someone I follow in IG has just deregistered their child and I just can’t believe how many families are choosing to do this.

Of course it is sometimes the right choice for the child but it seems that more and more children are being allowed to opt out of formal education.

Teenagers need to learn that life is hard and school will throw challenges at them. How they learn to deal with this impacts how they handle things as an adult. What happens when they enter the work place and they can’t just opt out of the difficult things? Where do they learn that resilience?

I have worked in education for 20 years and whilst I agree that some aspects of the system are broken, I don’t think home schooling is the answer to this.

The social aspect alone is impossible to replicate (walking to school together, having your first crush, a detention, school trips I could go on and on…) but I also don’t see how all of these parents can have the skills to teach their children to GCSE. I also find it so insulting to teachers who spend years learning their craft. It’s not just something you can pick up and do effectively.

Has anyone else noticed this?

I am autistic and was diagnosed long before it was "something everyone had". I spent school being bullied; being seated next to the most disruptive boy in the class so I could work as an unpaid 12-year-old teaching assistant and be a "good influence"; being bored as hell in mixed-ability classes. I'm nearly 30 now and from what I hear school is actually shitter than ever. Props to anyone home educating or facilitating DC to self-study

We home - educated our four, now adult children.
All work with people -focussed careers, always were socially capable with all ages from being young, something folk would comment on.
All have had knocks in life. They have 5 or 6 GCSE'S each (they don't need 10+) and at the local 6th form they all went to, we laughed as one teacher commented, "He's had a very cultured, broad education." We explained how he had been educated up to then from birth. :) The teacher hadn't known.
We had good friends and family who thought 'great.'
It was our normal, and hard work which life is, and would do it again in a heartbeat.

Oh! That brought back a core memory of being separated from my friend and stuck next to the disruptive boy in my class who then proceeded to torture me throughout the lesson, right in front of the teacher. I was grateful he didn't turn up very much.

Nonsense! Children do not have to suffer trauma in order to develop resilience. Trauma is neither necessary nor desirable for healthy psychological development. In fact, decades of research in developmental psychology and neuroscience show that resilient, well‑adjusted adults most often come from environments where they experienced safety, supportive relationships, and secure attachment rather than environments of threat or chronic stress.

😂

What a trite, ignorant statement to make.

I think difficult situations do need to be navigated, but I think it's about context. Do they need to be in a constantly stressful environment when developing in order to learn resilience?

I tend to think not. I don't see that constantly feeling on the edge develops true strength, but rather a kind of sad resignation, and that some people confuse the two.

I think both teachers and pupils are under more pressure these days. This warps the type of support the former can give and the latter can get. None of that is the fault of the teachers or the pupils but it is a reality. Teachers simply aren't in a position to use their intuition about how a particular child would best develop or the input they would best respond to.

I think humans develop best in a supportive and reinforcing environment that sometimes demands challenges to be met, not the kind of constant strain that many find the school system to be now with the incessant testing.

I could not agree more.

Homeschooling is really popular where I live in Canada. Nearly every family I know that does it are committed Christians. I know of one mum who takes it very seriously, but at the other end of the scale there's a mum who leaves the older kids in charge of the younger ones, and spends her day in town drinking coffee and getting her nails done. The older ones get no school work done because the younger ones are pestering them all the time. Another mum was projecting her anxieties onto the kids who started refusing school, so she thought homeschooling was the answer, but ended sinking into a major depression because they and she were totally unsuited to it.
It's never something I would consider. My kids are doing well at school and coping with all its highs and lows.

I am confident that a fraction of the parents homeschooling, even manage to come close to having the knowledge and intelligence to do it competently let alone be "far superior".

Homeschooling is really popular where I live in Canada. Nearly every family I know that does it are committed Christians. I know of one mum who takes it very seriously, but at the other end of the scale there's a mum who leaves the older kids in charge of the younger ones, and spends her day in town drinking coffee and getting her nails done. The older ones get no school work done because the younger ones are pestering them all the time. Another mum was projecting her anxieties onto the kids who started refusing school, so she thought homeschooling was the answer, but ended sinking into a major depression because they and she were totally unsuited to it.
It's never something I would consider. My kids are doing well at school and coping with all its highs and lows.

In my experience, it’s only people who don’t know much about home education that are against it.

Home education doesn’t necessarily mean it happens entirely within the home. Home ed groups exist and some children are taught by professional tutors for certain subjects, and take classes in local colleges, gaining formal qualifications.

So the Parents home educating who went to school and didn't get a GCSE..tell me again how school.is so great?

I have the complete opposite experience. Our home education group basically has a library of things and skills. As parents we share our skills with other families (sewing, theatre, maths, science, horticulture, bicycle repair, music) and we also share our resources, we all borrow equipment and books from each other and teach each other and our children new things. We've gone on holidays together and we also pool resources like magazine and educational app subscriptions, museum memberships etc. It's the most genuine and generous community that I have ever been a part of before. I went to school but I have a few friends who are home educating who were actually home educated. Has anyone on this thread actually been home educated or even spoken to a home educated adult?!

Well when it's a choice between leaving your child in an environment that is killing them or tightening the belt and reducing income so that your child benefit in an environment that fosters their well being and mental health.
I think you would make that sacrifice too. It's hard one of us works evenings and our income is unchanged lower but really we had no choice

“Trauma” and “difficult situations” are not remotely the same thing.

The problem is that everything gets labelled as “trauma” these days and kids are taught avoidance rather than coping skills and resilience, which leaves them ill equipped for adult life.

The massive epidemic of mental health issues, functional neurological disorders and other chronic illness we are now seeing amongst young adults is the result of this.

I think it's crazy that we have Ramos and lifts..why are we isolating wheelchairs users from stairs
A wheelchair users isn't going to learn to walk or pull themselves up stairs if they are enabled to be lazy with lifts and ramps.
I fear lifts and ramps risk making them reliant on the adjustments that non wheelchairs users don't need longer term

Maybe it’s because many young people have been raised in an outdated and failing system during their formative years.

Or maybe the adults you mention were brought up by parents who themselves lacked the tools to help their children become regulated, resilient adults.

I can promise you that most parents who choose to home educate do so to give their children a real chance of growing up mentally healthy, rather than being damaged by a toxic schooling system.

You might want to have a look at the “talent”
coming out of UK schools 😂

I agree with you OP, and while this will be an unpopular opinion I believe it is part of the reason we have a general lack of resilience and however many million NEETs.

I actually find that allowances and adjustments are much more likely in the real world than in the artificial world of school.
But also if Bob faints at the sight of blood he isn't going to train to be a nurse. As adults we tend to tailor our lives around our skills and interests for work and our lives. We don't go to hockey club if we don't like hockey
.

So if you hadn't been bullied at school you wouldn't have missed out..being bullied at school.didnt enhance your adult life and give you skills to manage bullies at work.
If you were bullied as an adult the skill.of punching honed through school bullying wouldnt be effective anyway as hitting a colleague isn't appropriate..

So what was the advantage of being bullied at school?

What good is being on the radar if school are failing to keep you safe or teach you anything..

Would you rather a child is forced I to school and sat in a room learning nothing but with their mental health worsening until they are suicidal

Or would you rather the parents home educated them so that they didn't become suicidal and learnt something (far more than school was prividing)

Are there any stats about unemployment for home-school educated kids vs unemployment for schooled kids?

I suppose whether or not home Ed is deemed successful for your child is dependant on what your definition of success at primary/secondary is.

Some families’ positive outcomes - in either setting - would be less acceptable to others.

There are groups of home schoolers whose children do mix with each other and most will be put into mainstream school for a while in order to make taking exams simpler.

If it works, that's great.