Homeschool or public school?

[OnMyJourney]

I am a mum to an almost 3 year old. She hasn’t gone to nursery and I don’t particularly love the idea of sending her to nursery or preschool. I understand they’re great ways to help kids develop and learn social skills but I hate the thought of sending my child with someone somewhere all day that I don’t know what’s going on, how she’s being treated by adults or other children, are her individual development needs being met or is she just another child in a group of children? I hated school, I don’t agree with the structure of the school curriculum, I feel like they try to turn kids into robots and make them into something they’re not interested in being. I know this may sound dramatic but at school I was bullied by teachers and other children, I was never a popular child I didn’t have many friends and when I did make a friend the soon seemed to disappear. I left school nearly 10 years ago and I don’t speak to anyone I know from school. My medical conditions were overlooked, my head of year and school nurse used to look at me like I’m insane when I talked about my PCOS and how it affected me. I had anxiety the whole way through year 10/11 because of social peer pressure, the stress of GCSE’s and the bullying that the school failed to address. I know this was my experience and my daughter might not have the same experience but how can I know that for sure. I don't like the curriculum I think they waste kids days teaching them about irrelevant things (not everything but some things are like come on for reallll?) I don’t like the fact they worry more about attendance than your child being sick, I hate that they can fine you for taking your kids out for a holiday (Where I work I can’t take holiday in half terms) I hate they feel like they can dictate what my child can or can’t eat, my dad is a Qualified nutritionist who solidly backs what I feed my child but a lot of schools say I wouldn’t be allowed to bring that as a pack lunch.

I understand to some people I may sound crazy or going off my experience which I guess to an extent I am… but I would hate to put my child through what I went through… but on the other hand I’m really worried about making my child miss out on things like making friends, I wouldn’t want her to grow up alone…

Thankfully my work does actually work around homeschooling and I really feel like that’s the right decision but I don’t want her to grow up resenting me for keeping her home, I want her to make friends, then comes the question of do you homeschool their entire school life or just until a certain point?

if anyone has faced this dilemma and has any advice, experiences etc I’d really appreciate it ❤️him

You do sound crazy. Your post is all about yourself rather than your daughter. Chill out and be positive.

Do you mean public school? In the uk public school is very posh prep schools and boarding/day school once older. I guess you mean state school.

purely based on your post I think you really need to look for a part time nursery for the sake of your dc because you sound like you are over protective and aren’t really in a good place, sorry if this is blunt but this is for the good of your dc. You do not need to send them full time, my dc went mornings only each weekday, 3 hours a day, community owned and I was on the committee plus volunteered in the class 1 morning a fortnight. If this is too much straight away, look at settings where you stay too to build up your confidence to leave your dc.

you didn’t like school but your dc may love school, be positive about it, give it a chance. One of my DD’s loved school, so much that they chose to board from 16! The other hated school because all kids are different but we worked with the school so she got all her GCSE’s and a levels at top grades

The OP means public school as in one that is open to the public.

Yes, I know public schools are eton, harrow and so on but some of us don’t move in monied circles.

I too am curious about the reference to public school in the thread title.

My elder son couldn’t access a state school education so we had the choice of either me giving up my job and home educating, or a very small, specific private school. We were lucky that we were able to choose the latter. That was 15 years ago and home ed was far less common then than it is now.

We know a few families who have done home edding for a variety of reasons. All use local groups/tutors which come with a cost. Of those young people, all of them have gone down a year from their original school year group. I don’t know if that’s common in home ed - I assume not - but it is amongst the young people I know.

One family home educated solely due to the mum’s intense dislike of schools.

Po brought up a good point- when will you sleep? When I worked nights, I slept during the morning and woke up early afternoon.

Don’t push your issues on your child. Let her live her own life. Of course she should be in education.

Your child is 3 years old. It sounds like she has never been given the opportunity to develop vital developmental skills, such as communication, social etc. And now you are considering depriving her of learning them indefinitely because of your own experiences many years ago and perhaps at a different stage in your education.

Your past trauma and your DC’s development should not be conflated. You should tackle both separately. It’s unfair to isolate your DC in this way, without giving her the chance to experience what essentially forms part of typical child development.

I’m not opposed to homeschooling when the alternative is truly unsatisfactory. But that’s not the case in this scenario. Your decision is based on your own anxiety. You should treat your mental health issues so they don't impact negatively on your DC for their entire life.

I have no idea why you feel you can teach your child about the world, while closeting her from it. The only person who will suffer in this situation is your DD.

That's very brave of you to admit that home schooling didn't work for you.

I think teaching is a skill that a lot of people don't have. You can be very knowledgable about many things but imparting that information so that someone else can take it in and understand it isn't as easy as it sounds.

An acquaintance of mine decided to home educate her children. Like you, she didn't have the experience or training to realise that they weren't doing as well as they should. Fortunately, she decided that home educating four children with an age range of several years wasn't working so she sent them to school.

It turned out that more than one child was dyslexic and another was autistic. They were behind their peers so she paid for tutors to bring them up to speed and get them to pass their maths and English GCSEs.

@RampantIvy yes i think it’s a common problem among home educators. It turned out I knew lots of stuff but couldn’t explain it at all, or at least not in a way that young children could understand.

Also we didn’t know when we started it that both my kids are autistic with speech and language processing issues, plus one is dyslexic as well, so now in school even highly experienced and trained teachers have struggled to support them.

Generally I’m a bit sceptical of home education now although obviously it works for some families.

Ok so I have always home educated. Never used any kind of nursery or preschool and then never sent my children to school. Now my eldest would be in year 11 if in school so I have done the whole hog(almost).
I didn’t home educate because I hated school, in fact I enjoyed school. I do think it is unfair to not allow a child to do something simply because their parent didn’t like it.

I originally planned just to home ed for a few years and transition into state school but we found it so enjoyable that actually we carried on. We have revisited the option of school at certain points but to be honest my kids have never really wanted to go and have thrived at home.
Sometimes it can be hard work and of course it is stressful at times but mostly for me it is fun and rewarding. It certainly isn’t always the perfect life that you sometimes see portrayed on Instagram, You can see on this thread that it is not for everyone but for some of us it works well.
You have to really put yourself out there and meet others. Your child is three so it’s a good age to start doing that, find local groups on Facebook and meet others who are considering doing the same.

Op it is very easy to look at a 3 year old and feel panic at the thought of someone else being very closely involved in them.

Think longer term. Hammering the life skills is all very well (home education is not the sole vehicle for the teaching of life skills) but what will you do when she’s 11. What will you do to ensure she has qualifications. You may have had a poor experience of school but that’s not a reason to stop your own child going.

I would teach my daughter literacy, maths, science, geography, history, practical life skills, and about the world around her.

You say you will teach her, amongst other things, history. But are you going to be able to adequately teach her the history curriculum when you found it boring and don't see why it is important?

I am not against homeschooling in all cases but I think where the parents don't have a strong academic background and don't have teaching skills, it is often a real disservice to the child.

In Y9 my DD learnt about the history of the cold war, the break up of the eastern bloc and then the origins of the war in Ukraine. They learnt about how and why the war has happened.
All of Year 9 was spent on the history of Europe starting with WW1. I think understanding the past is vital to understanding the current geopolitical situation.

You don’t need to teach the curriculum when you home educate(you may already know that), it’s really important to point this out because so many people assume that you do have to stick to it.

Personally I love history and have covered a lot with my kids, some that is on the curriculum and much more that is not but in my area we also have regular home education workshops run by several museums and castles which cover so many different parts of history. They started out as being the same workshops that were offered to schools but then they realised they could have a lot more fun with home ed workshops as they didn’t need to only offer topics that complimented the curriculum which is what schools tend to want. This is something that is growing as venues are realising how common home education is becoming and obviously isn’t just limited to the subject of history.

At school I was told I was pretty terrible at a certain subject and grew to dislike it because of that, didn’t think about it for years. But as a home educator I have come to realise that actually school did me a disservice because I absolutely love that subject area and really enjoy learning alongside my children. Turns out I am not rubbish at it at all, I just didn’t fit the very narrow scope that the curriculum said meant you were good at it.
And if you really do find something boring and genuinely aren’t good at it, you can of course outsource. Again this is an area that has grown hugely given the increase in numbers of children being home educated.

Because I have been involved in home education for a long time I have seen a lot of changes particularly since COVID and there is now so much more available to home educators.than 10/15 years ago.

One of the reasons I chose school over home education is because I wanted my DD to be exposed to views and people that are different than my own. I think home education can provide socialisation, but at least to start with it can be very parent directed & curated. Adults will tend to link up with people who have similar views to themselves. By going to school you are exposed to different cultures, ́lifestyles and views. For exampke, my DD isnt religious and im an atheist. However, one of her good friends is deeply religous and observant. They met because they go to school.

This isnt a judgement of home education, every family has different circumstances, but for our family school has supported DD's independence and exposure to the world beyond our immediate social circle both by studying subjects like RE, history & geography and just by mixing with a wide range of people.

I think you are projecting from your own memories. Just because you don’t love the idea does not mean your dc would not benefit from the education system. Not sure where you are or had your experience (public school reference suggests not in UK) but times change and not all preschools/nurseries and schools are the same. You may want to look at flexi schooling for example.

Its wild to me that people think they can be better at teaching than a professional, trained, experienced teacher.

Also OP, its genuinely beneficial for children to be one in a crowd at school. At home they are supposed to be the apple of your eye. At school they learn how to be part of a community with all its pluses and minuses, including difficult kids and difficult teachers. This prepares them for real life which comes with much more of the same.

The dismissive way you talk about history and other subjects shows me you are not well suited to homeschooling.

Give school a go, take it from there.

Don’t deny your child the opportunity of a normal life and friendships just because of your hang ups.

Couldn’t agree more

Just to say that’s possible in home ed circles as well. I plan to home ed my son as an atheist, who comes from a family of raised catholics turned anti-religion. A close friend who home Ed’s is deeply religious and we have frequent play dates. There are children from backgrounds as diverse as one could expect in schools in our local home ed community, and I doubt that’s specific to our local area.

All of Year 9 was spent on the history of Europe starting with WW1. I think understanding the past is vital to understanding the current geopolitical situation.

I tell my students that the origins of WW1 can be traced as far back as the division of Charlemagne's Empire at the Treaty of Verdun in 843!

And we look back to the Kievan/Kyivan Rus when talking about Russia and Ukraine.

The point being, that things don't happen in isolation - nearly everything happens because of something else that happened before.

All those things you’re suggesting you do for homeschooling are what decent parents do with their children at weekends, holidays and after school anyway. They don’t make up a homeschooling curriculum. Your judgment is very skewed because of your school experiences, and that’s very unfair on your daughter.

I had 'lessons' where I learned hymns. I also learned how to iron and starch a man's shirt.

I will probably remember a few later, but those two things stick out as things I have never needed as an adult.

School doesn’t equal diversity, it is very area dependent. The schools in my area that my dc would have attended have a large majority (over 95%) of pupils from one particular background and are not very diverse in that respect. I went to school myself where we only have one pupil in my year who was not white British. Of course in some places there is a lot of diversity in school but it’s certainly not a given and I wouldn’t rely on school alone to do that.

Through home ed groups and the extra curricular activities they attend my children have mixed with a much more diverse range of people than they would have met at the local schools. We don’t just stay in our town, we travel to local cities which are naturally more diverse and mix with people with different religious beliefs, from different parts of the world, with different backgrounds and with a whole range of different needs.

I am sure there are home ed families who don’t mix outside of their own beliefs and I am also sure there are schooled families that do the same.

We were taught how to curtsey(bow for the boys), I have no idea why and I have never needed it(and tbh would never do it even if I were meeting the king).