this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Are American schools really that horrible?
Not just American ones.
My kids seem to be doing ok. I mean they're not crazy about studying and homework and they have the odd complaint about a teacher, but they made great friends, they have pretty good teachers overall. It's probably not the same everywhere or for everyone but I don't think they'd be happy stuck in the house with me every day.
They'd probably prefer spending time with a parent who loves them over having to listen to an unmotivated teacher who should've retired 20 years ago drone at them.
They'd probably prefer spending time with kids their own age with similar interests, bonding over dissatisfaction with the unmotivated teachers. I had an awkward and unpopular adolescence, and even then I enjoyed the socialization I did get in public school much more than my brief stint with homeschooling.
Is school the only place where they can bond with other children?
Of course not, but is there another option with similar regularity and exposure to such a wide variety of people? It's a societal microcosm.
As a queer person, haha, you're funny
Tolerant parents exist. In a public school, you are all but guaranteed to deal with bigots.
I'd rather not give more power to intolerant ones. The more I talk to other queer people and their relationships with parents, the more I become an unironical family abolitionist
Trans mom here. We do exist and can break the cycle.
We homeschooled and some of the first GNC examples I saw were teens and adult kids of other homeschooling parents.
I'm sorry, sounds like you had some bad experiences at school. I won't say there are no teachers like that but by and large my kids' teachers are pretty decent. During parent-teacher meetings they mostly seem to be pretty aware of who's who and what's going on in class.
I'm sure there are places where it's much worse though. It can be tough for kids.
My "friends" used to frame me and get me into trouble with teachers. And I wouldn't rat on them because they were my "friends". Not saying the teachers should have realized this, but there's a lot going on that they don't know about.
I had a blast in public school. Great friends great teachers, sure a few sucked but that's life. Every homeschool kid I know that wound up in public school eventually was weird af at first, but usually came around after a while. Being locked up with only your parents usually with them feeding you extreme religious BS is horrible for a child. Homeschool should be illegal, most parents are too dumb to be teachers.
Extreme religious bullshit? Dude, not all of us are American evangelicals.
They probably would, but that wouldn't prepare them for a life of listening to college lectures, corporate meetings, boring social events, etc that "drone at them." Giving a kid an unrealistic view of what adult life is and encouraging dependent personality disorder doesn't sound that healthy to me. For me, school absolutely made me do stuff I didn't want to do, and now in my 30s I see that's pretty much the definition of being an "adult"
They can attend lectures outside of school. Homeschool doesn't mean locking them in a room.
Even if they'd rather hear an unqualified religious crazy teach them (they don't), that doesn't make it a good idea. Children would prefer to spend all day playing video games, so I don't know if preference is the measure to use here.
Who said anything about religion?
A good 80% of home schooling is done so religious crazies can shelter their children from anything that disagrees with their holy book.
Maybe in your neck of the woods, but around here, it's a minority. I'd say about 40% homeschool because institutional school doesn't have enough services for their special-needs kids (ADHD, hyperactivity, giftedness, dyslexia, etc.), about another 30% do it just out of conviction that there's another way that kids can learn (especially the whole unschooling movement, but there's also Montessori, project-based learning, etc.) and there's no alternative school around, the other ~30% is a mix of family circumstances, bad experiences with schools (bullying especially) and yes, religious zealots. The law was drastically tightened a few years ago, mostly because of these religious zealots, so they aren't very popular here.
COVID also changed that landscape a lot; a lot of anti-vax and anti-maskers started homeschooling when institutional schools started mandating these things, but most of these parents soon realized it was much more work than they thought and returned their kids at school as soon as the mandated were dropped.
A lot of parents don't love their kids. And a lot of parents love their kids but still end up treating them like shit.
Fuck yes. At the time, I was glad my school didn't have much violence. When my trans egg started to crack, and I was a male shaving his legs and painting his toenails... Well, no one accepted me, nor hated me either. I dropped out and took a year of homeschooling, and studying alone and cycling everyday was a wonderfup break. But that backing off into more dependence on my parents fucked up my life for a while anyways.
Mine definitely weren't when I graduated in 2016. Towards the end there, I legit spent most of the day just sitting in the band hall with a handful of 360 controllers playing games (mostly Duck Game) on my laptop with friends and passersby. Virtual classes, concurrent college classes, and a travel hour pretty much gave me free reign to fuck around most of the week because I wasn't required to be in class except on specific days for those classes. Never got physically bullied, even had a middle-school verbal bully apologize to me. I saw plenty of people come out as LGBT comfortably, I saw football players compliment the marching band, it really wasn't that bad unless you were one of those people who got into fights, stole shit, and tried to sell drugs.
I have no doubt that schools can be hellholes, but I wouldn't say it's a given.
Yes. In my experience it was frequently a Lord of the Flies situation. I had hour long bus rides in my rural district where the only adult was busy driving. Knowing teenagers you can probably imagine how the freaks and geeks got treated.
Kids in America are so fucking cruel. We're taught pretty much from the get-go that it's everyone for themselves, and the only thing that keeps it from turning into Lord of the Flies is the school's culpability if one kid kills another.
Yeah. I was relentlessly bullied throughout school, and it only ended when I went to a different school district. The teachers did absolutely nothing and whenever they did notice something they ruled it a "double fault".