I can speak to the pros and cons of homeschooling as a current unschooling dad.
Pros: You get to spend more time with your kid: For many homeschoolers, this is big. I enjoy spending time with my daughter. She enjoys spending time with me. The time we have together as parent and child is limited and the relationship we build now will last well into her adult years. Sending her to school would severely limit the potential of that relationship. You get to learn: What I mean by this is that the emphasis in homeschooling is about learning not preparing for exams and drilling. We spend time learning about various things. Learning is part of our life not separate from it as it is in school. You have flexibility: In school when it’s time for math you have to do the math. When it’s time for recess you do recess. If you want to do more math or more recess you don’t have that option. With homeschooling we do. If my daughter is learning about the presidents (as she is currently interested in doing) and we want to continue that we can. We can spend an entire day on this. So, the learning can be deeper and more engaging. You preserve curiosity: For many kids, schools have a way of killing curiosity by emphasizing drilling, testing, and the rigid demands of the school schedule. With homeschooling, it is much easier to preserve a child’s curiosity and give it room to grow. Cons: You are responsible for everything: Ultimately this is true of every family but you feel this more when homeschooling. As a family, we need to take steps to ensure that our daughter is getting a good education in all areas. We do this fairly well by being creative and not simply drilling subjects just because they “need to know them.” Socialization: This is often seen as a “con” of homeschooling but it is much easier to socialize with homeschooling than with public schooling. The reason I say this is because we are free to explore the many options for socializing in the real world as opposed to being forced to socialize in a school setting where kids are grouped in artificial ways: such as by age. You are paying for a resource you don’t use: All property owners pay taxes to support the public school. So, one of the downsides of homeschooling is that you are paying to support a school system that you are not using. For our family, these are not very major downsides and are easy enough to workaround. The benefits of homeschooling easily outweigh them. Like many families, we choose to homeschool to avoid the many more cons of public schooling which include: Cons: A seemingly relentless obsession with testing instead of learning. For many school districts, there is a perceived need to focus on testing as succeeding on high-stakes tests is necessary to get proper funding. But, it does have the effect of crowding out real learning and often kills off curiosity as well. Public schooling is coercive: With forced attendance, rigid scheduling forced exams, and homework much of schooling is based on coercion. That can’t be healthy for kids of almost any age. The underlying message which is also damaging is that we don’t trust kids to learn unless they are forced to do so. the presumption is that learning won’t occur naturally without such coercion. Artificial socialization: Think about how people socialize in the real world. They interact with others of different ages and backgrounds in different ways through, mostly, voluntary interactions. In schooling, socialization is often forced and is usually done by age. Sometimes this leads to the formation of lifelong friendships. Sometimes not. But, in any case, it misses many other real opportunities to socialize. Pros: I admit I am biased towards homeschooling. Even worse, I have a homeschooling bias towards unschooling! So, seeing the pros of public schooling is a little more difficult for me. And, I am saying this having been through public schooling myself. Perhaps that makes it even more difficult to see the pros. Even so, Easy access to a variety of activities: While homeschoolers can participate in sports, art, music, theater, and many other activities these are all easily available at many public schools. Of course, with problems in funding, many of these programs are becoming rare in public schools. Access to a variety of educators: Again, homeschoolers can gain access to many different teachers but in public schools, they are all there in one place. But, access to these educators is one thing, getting quality learning from them is quite another. It’s not the teacher's fault for this. In large part, they are mandated to do certain things in the classroom and many of these things (like preparing for high stakes testing) take time away from actual teaching. Freedom from the responsibility for their child’s learning: I don’t know how big a factor this is for parents but as I mentioned above I believe it is every parent’s responsibility to see to their child’s learning so this shouldn’t be seen as a benefit. In any case, it is risky to assume that simply sending your kids to public school will take care of their learning. Force rarely works to achieve goals and when it comes to raising children it would certainly not work well.
Your question seems to assume that if the parents weren't involved but the state would, there be no bias in raising children. But, why should that be? You would simply be substituting one set of biases (the parents) for a different set of biases (the states). And, the cost of this substitution would be quite high including a huge infringement of autonomy. Parents have biases and make mistakes in raising their children. But, with so many parents raising kids in so many ways the potential for large-scale harm is minimal compared to a system where there would be one ultimate authority for raising children. In such a case, if there were mistakes made (and there certainly would be) they would be duplicated on a massive scale. Yes, it is unfortunate that some parents teach kids that violence is an acceptable way to resolve their problems. Also unfortunate that some parents raise their kids to be racists and homophobes. But, at their worst, these cases are not systematic and duplicated on a wide scale. There are problems with liberty as the basis for social arrangements but the goods far outweigh the problems. As Friedrich Hayek once pointed out, to get the benefits of liberty we have to be prepared to pay some of the costs of people who will do things with their liberty we don’t like. The best we can do is to encourage the free and open exchange of useful information regarding parenting practices. What works and what doesn’t work are in many ways well understood. One of the principles that are well accepted among those who study child development is that force is not an effective way to raise kids or teach them or discipline them. Using force as a way to get parents to change their parenting practices would fly in the face of that principle. How would a child feel about numbers if they had never gone through formal kindergarten education?8/1/2022
My daughter has been unschooled and feels just fine about numbers. They are not something to struggle with or be frustrated with. We use them as tools and explore interesting things about them as we do with letters and other things we use and interact with.
We approach numbers as something that can be useful in many ways. We use them to tell time, to measure for making a recipe, for counting how many hangers we need after we do laundry. We play games and do activities with numbers and other mathematical things such as graphs, charts, rulers, protractors, and so on. I suspect that many kids come by their hatred of math and numbers because of formal schooling. Numbers are often forced on them without any useful context and they learn how to add, subtract, and multiply by drills and memorization instead of by seeing how they can be useful. So, they develop math anxiety or math phobia and this stays with them well into adulthood. In my college teaching experience, I often saw students struggling with math courses and expressing their long-held dislike of math. This hatred most likely did not come from being homeschooled or unschooled. No, it came from formal schooling often imposed too early on children before they are developmentally ready to engage in formal learning. It’s a shame because numbers are so interesting and such an integral part of the world around us. Kids miss out on so much by only seeing numbers as things to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Instead, they could see them as useful tools that help them accomplish their goals and also as a beautiful language that helps us understand the world around us. |