Just watched Varg's newest video about home schooling...

>Unfortunately homeschooling is illegal in Germany since after WW2.

Well we can't have people teaching their own children unauthorized ideas after all, can we.

Yes public schools in America are so shit you would very likely have an academic advantage doing home school

"Why is it that I have never met a dull six year old, and I have never met an interesting sixteen year old? What have you done?" -- Gore Vidal (speaking to American school teachers)

>I don't think most parents are capable of home-schooling.
This. I stopped going to school because I was entitled and my parents "homeschooled" me through middle school. I watched a couple Nova DVDs and did a tiny bit of math I already knew. I played vidya all day and had friends from elementary come over every weekend. I regularly stayed up all night and got fat on soda (when I stopped drinking soda I dropped off all the weight in a month). Clearly it would have been worse if I hadn't already gained social skills and friends from my first five years of education.

Although in the end it solidified how fucking shit public school is, because when I went back to high school everything was still easy as fuck and apparently I hadn't missed any math material at all over those three years. My biggest regret is that if I had stayed in the system I would have been better prepared for college in terms of how shit works in the world and had a better idea of what to do with my life. Has nothing to do with the garbage education, just being in the system.

I suspect you have two options if you want to improve the education of kids: expensive private school that cares more about the quality of teachers, or doing your best to supplement their education at home to make sure that school is a fucking breeze to them and they are constantly ahead of the subjects that are taught worst (math). Really, just be involved.

In the US the majority of people who do home schooling do it either because they're very religious and don't want their kids learning about evolution or because they're very libertarian and don't want their kids being educated by the state.

For this reason there's a big cultural bias against homeschoolers where students may be rejected from university programs or jobs because no one wants to deal with a religious nutjob or an uneducated libertarian.

let me guess, you think your some guy that will one day change the world when in reality you wank over a girl that accidentally touched your hand one time

My mother was a professional home school teacher (i.e. she ran a registered home school out of our house and taught 1-2 students a year in it). It was very important to her that I went to public school instead of home schooling, and I have to agree with her that in 99% of cases, public school or private school is better than home schooling. Because the most important lessons you learn in school aren't the things the teachers test you on, it's how to behave appropriately in social situations. Things like "people don't have to do what you want them to do," "you will enjoy social interaction more if you legitimately care about the other people," and "there are people who will pretend to be your friend and then be awful to you," etc. etc.

All of the students she taught had some sort of learning disability, to the point that they were in danger of repeating a grade. The one-on-one attention she could give really did help them catch up academically, but would also do a number on their social lives. She also made a point of never home schooling any one student for more than ~3-4 years, tops, depending on how old they were. The parents who ignored her advice and continued to have their kid home schooled invariably ended up with a kid who is shit at appropriate social behavior (e.g. one girl who just graduated high school is known as being extremely sexually promiscuous, another who graduated a few years back is a fat loser who won't leave their parent's house, etc.).

tl;dr: It works great for what it's good at, but it is not an appropriate one-size-fits-all panacea.

Speaking as someone who never gave a fuck growing up, and who actually ended up dropping out of HS to get my GED instead, this "anti-school" stuff is so childish and stupid. School doesn't turn you into some mindless drone. That's shit I would expect from an edgy teenager, not a science board on the internet.

Ultimately, what you get out of public schools depends on two things: Where you went to school and what kind of effort you put into learning. Me, I never really put much effort into it when I was young, but I was a smart kid who grew up in a state with a great education system, so I learned a lot anyways. It helped that it wasn't exactly the inner city or anything.

Anyway, my point is this: Stop whining about public schools. If you aren't happy with the public school system in your community, then move somewhere else or demand changes in how public schools are funded. I will never agree that homeschooling is the solution because it opens the door to either too much religious indoctrination or too much "stupid people teaching kids," neither of which are good. That said, I guess I don't really have an issue with it if you want to homeschool your kids, even if I do think it's a bad idea.

Ex-homeschooled kid here.

There's not a doubt in my mind that social interaction is important, but it's influence on academics may not be the end all be all. Growing up, my social interaction was playing soccer for a local club, so I didn't get nearly as much social interaction as did public schoolers. Today, I ask friends/coworkers if they could have guessed that I was homeschooled, none of them would have guessed correct. My academic track record ain't too shabby either.

TL;DR:
>Social interaction may not be that important to academic success

I'll answer questions if there's any

>or too much "stupid people teaching kids,"
and why is public school free from that concern? You can't fire bad teachers.

>or too much "stupid people teaching kids,"
In public high school I had a math course taught by a gym coach who couldn't math.

It's important to teach a child social skills but I think that can be done with other activities outside of school. I, and I'm sure most of Veeky Forums, can learn 5x times faster on my own than at school.

i attribute a lot of my success in academics to the competitive environment that schools foster. Wouldn't homeschool lack this and especially the ability to compare your ability to your peers?

My schools didn't foster competition, but there was still some of it. I was recalling it last night with my sister, there was a 6th grade English class where you did silent reading in class. I would read fast to be the first, and would be eager to answer questions on the chapter.

Yes I'm ADHD, I am a Mensan too.

During math they had "around the world" where you try to answer a problem faster than other students, and if you made it around back to your seat, you "won".

Competition is an easy way to manipulate the best males into doing better. I wish they did more of it instead of the continual assessment faggotry.

I attribute a lot of my lack of success to not being pushed through high school to figure out what I want to do and prepare for what comes next, however, I still find academic competitiveness to be useless. I've only felt competitive towards education at one point in my life, when a Japanese kid in elementary was the first person to be as fast as me at mental arithmetic. He surpassed me and I felt a little bad for a week. By the time I found people who weren't complete shit at STEM in college, I was more interested in finding out what parts they were good at and learning from them than beating them.

Ex homeschooler here.

Funny you should mention that. During my time as a homeschooler, I was terrified that I wasn't measuring up well to my peers. Thankfully, my home environment was a great one. My mother was very supportive and convinced me that the things that I was studying were different than what was in public school, so in some ways I was smarter in some ways than the average highschooler.

College did introduce me to the competitive aspect though, which I appreciate. To really answer your question however, yes. Homeschooling lacks this quality.