Paul Elie explains in The Atlantic why homeschooling his kids in NYC was a money-saving move. The other options, as he saw them: moving to a more expensive neighborhood (for the better school district), paying private school tuition, or engaging in “New York’s notoriously inadequate education system.” His kids go to museums and take some courses with other homeschool kids and play soccer and have math lessons around the kitchen table in the morning. “Everybody in life makes choices.“
The glorious return of Everybody in life makes choices. This is a reminder to myself to say that more often starting… now.
I was homeschooled up until 9th grade and I do not recommend it really without huge caveats, but it has more to do with my relationship with my parents than it does with my education.
@MargaretMead I don’t mean to pry, but would you mind elaborating a little? I’m genuinely curious — do you think it was just too much togetherness with your parents? ruined your current relationship? I wasn’t homeschooled but had plenty of time to be bothered by my parents, though not until high school-ish…
@science_is_real
this might turn in to a TL:DR
Absolutely too much time with my parents.
My mom and dad are lovely people, but:
1. My mom didn’t know how to ‘teach’ she would just buy math textbooks and make us do the problems all day. If you’ve ever sat in a math classroom you know that the teacher explains how to do things, and then you do the problems based on that information. I had no context for the work that I was doing, I never learned any studying, time management, or test taking skills. In the state that grew up in the only performance rubric for homeschooling is a biannual standardized test.
2. I also did not socialize much as a child, and am still in my late twenties dealing with crazy amounts of social anxiety stemming from my transition in to the public school system. Even if you do manage to get time with other kids growing up, there is always a stigma against ‘the homeschooled kid’. I didn’t make friends with anybody my age until college.
ETA: My mom also badgered me to make friends, which was not helpful.
3. As I got older I would spend all day fighting with my mom, and ultimately it was my decision to go to school. I don’t regret it at all. I think I would be a different person if I had been homeschooled all the way up until college. I got tired of fighting with my mom all the time.
4. My brother was also homeschooled and has some (very very very) serious mental health issues that were (obviously to me in retrospect) present as a child but not addressed because they could not be contextualized in terms of what is ‘normal behavior’.
These are just my experiences, so please take it all with an internet grain of salt. #myparentsarehippies
@MargaretMead Thanks for the perspective! Kids are still purely hypothetical to me but the concept of homeschooling-to-afford-to-stay-in-NYC is something I’ve thought about, in a “I’m well educated so how hard can it be?” sort of way. But your first point makes so much sense, and I was super awkward/shy as a kid even in public schools, so I can only imagine how things would have ended up if I wasn’t forced to attempt to fit in from age 6 onwards…
@science_is_real Love your username! Also, “well educated” and “a good teacher” are two totally different things. I am the former but definitely not the latter.
@kellyography I am a teacher, and I’ve worked in both public and private schools, and I could see MAYBE homeschooling a child but only if: 1) the kid was really bright and intellectually curious in ways that weren’t being rewarded by the school, 2) you as a parent are interested in pedagogy, have some experience with best practices within education, and 3) the child will still have lots of social outlets built into their day.
Schools, even GOOD ones!, often ignore high-performing students. As long as the kids get good test scores, they are not a priority. Good teachers have plenty of work differentiating for the kids who are struggling in various ways and at class level, and most schools are very, very resistant today to let students “skip” a grade.
I went to public schools and made it out just fine. Public schools would be my first preference for any potential future children. I have a lot of friends though who had great experiences with home schooling and are wildly successful today; but they met all of the aforementioned criteria.
There was an trend piece article in the NYT a year or two ago about rich people on the upper east and west sides suddenly noticing that the local public elementary schools were really great and now suddenly those schools are overcrowded as a result. There was a line in it from a parent that started “Like most people, I assumed I would send my child to private schools,” which made me go asdlfkjdaklfjdfkladf.
I…haven’t really known anyone who has benefited from homeschooling. And this includes my own brother.
@Megano! Yes. The ones that are homeschooled for religious reasons are often in the worst shape, but even the ones with educated parents who take it seriously are often socially inept. I have some cousins that did this. The kids basically received no education because no one in their group had anything beyond a high school education, and none of them would take science seriously.
To me, the biggest thing about school is social development – this is where you learn to deal with people you don’t like, and who may not like you. Home school, by definition is cutting kids off from those kinds of interactions and discomforts.
The one exception I see is kids with serious issues that prevent them from having reasonable experience in a school. I had one student who was the most extreme case of ADHD I’ve ever seen. He wasn’t capable of sitting still or focusing – this was waaaaaaaay beyond typical wiggly kid behavior. He had been kicked out of every single school in two districts and was drugged out of his gourd. He would have benefited from a totally different environment, but his parents couldn’t afford to do that.
@sony_b My brother was taken out of school in high school because he suffered a head injury when he was much younger, but I neve really understood why he was taken out because he didn’t seem to be having any trouble academically (or even socially, he had lots of friends and even cousins at school with him who were helping him out), and it seemed like the school was being really accomodating to his needs. At this point I don’t think he even had his high school diploma or GED (and he is 29), and his social skills are not great (though he does make a lot of effort with them, which I really admire him for, I just feel like he would be better adjusted and able to handle a lot of things better if he had stayed in a school environment).
@sony_b Oh hai. See my above thread. I basically agree 1000%
@Megano! I’ve met one! One of my really good friends was taken out of elementary school because of horrible bullying. There weren’t any other schools within 5 hours of her home so she was homeschooled. She’s done quite well for herself: she’s a published poet, has an MA in English, she’s a director for a cultural preservation non-profit in her hometown, she was a finalist for an international indigenous leadership award, and founded the first public library in her hometown. She’s also 25. I wonder how much of that she would have done if she spent her formative years just trying not to get beat up every day.
I would love to see people like this spending the time they would’ve spent home schooling volunteering at their kid’s school and making a difference for a lot of underprivileged kids instead of just making a difference for some already privileged kids.
@Tuna Surprise I agree that homeschooling isn’t a solution to the larger education problems in the country, but I don’t think volunteering at your kids’ school would really make much of a difference, especially when the main issues are overcrowding and lack of funding. We sometimes had parental volunteers at my school and I can’t remember them doing anything much. And most adults don’t remember enough to be helpful in classes like math and science after about the sixth grade.
@darklingplain As a former teacher, I have to disagree about parental volunteers, especially in the younger grades. Having extra adults in a classroom is almost always helpful even if they don’t really know what they’re doing. Kids generally behave better in the presence of adults and even if it’s still just the one teacher doing the real teaching, a calmer classroom is one that is learning more.
@darklingplain I think people overestimate the usefulness of parental volunteers. I went from a hippie-dippy elementary school which relied heavily on parental volunteers to a regular one, and my mother said she was surprised when they told her they didn’t really encourage parents coming in because they didn’t think it added much.
Like with most things, I don’t think the “fix” is a few people changing their personal choices. What we need is a complete change in the social system.
@sony_b Yeah, you’re right about the younger grades, but I think in the article their kids were in fifth grade, by which point parental volunteers become a little redundant. Also, being volunteers, they don’t usually have any training in teaching, and I distinctly remember getting really frustrated by parental volunteers in third or fourth grade because they were telling me what to do without knowing what they were talking about.
@Tuna Surprise let’s throw money at our problems, why can’t their kid go to public school and the parents donate what would be probably a fraction of private school tuition to that school’s foundation.
@Tuna Surprise Even if the parents didn’t want to volunteer at the school, they could have continued the museum trips and what not as a supplement to the public school education. Or, if they could afford it, things like music lessons or the chance to take college classes in the evenings/weekends at a local community college while in high school.
I don’t know, I had the opportunity to go free to private schools that were top notch academically for all but one year (8th grade) and the year I spent in public school was yes, not as academically challenging but also perfectly fine. My younger sister ended up graduating from the high school connected to the middle school where I did 8th grade and is now excelling academically at a top liberal arts college.
I think a lot of people make public school seem a lot worse than it is. I know someone who also had a chance to go to top notch private schools like me for most of her life, until high school (maybe mid high school?) when she moved to DC and switched into a very large overcrowded not very good public school. And she loved it and was very happy with going there vs a private school. Granted, she’d already had 8 or 9 years of top education by then but still
I think if you’re the kind of parent who is privileged enough to have the knowledge to home school your kids you can also put them in public school and supplement their education on the weekends with books, math packets, museum visits, music lessons, etc. so that the kid gets all the benefits of being in a school with other kids, you don’t have to quit your job, and your kid gets a level of education above what the school is providing.
@seaermine Well, and there is a LOT of diversity within private and public schools. I went to a public school that was very rigorous. My boyfriend went to a public school with teachers who came in drunk, allowed students to publicly harrass each other, and often put tv shows on and fell asleep (like Bad Teacher). We both turned out okay – because mostly, kids are resiliant, and home life is a huge factor.
Since graduating from college I have been a teacher at a top public school, and just started at a well-esteemed private school. From the inside, I think the public school was far more professional and well-run. They also had higher standards for staff and more innovation in place than the private school. I’m not sure I would notice or know about those things though as an outside parent evaluating both places.
@seaermine Agreed. My family moved around a lot growing up, so I got to experience a wide variety of public schools. Most of them were unchallenging, and one was a pretty bad semi-urban school (although nothing like what some urban schools have become today – we didn’t have metal detectors or armed guards or anything). I ended up “re-learning” concepts over and over. In one instance I was re-learning stuff in 7th grade (this was at the shitty urban school) that I had already learned in 4th grade. Then for high school I went to a wealthy suburban school where everyone had been reading Shakespeare since 7th grade (where I was having to re-learn basic words and parts of speech in my previous “honors” english class.) BUT you know what, I turned out ok anyway. I ended up going to a good liberal arts college and a fancy “top 14″ law school. I guess my point is, school isn’t going to teach you very much anyway. If you’re smart, you will learn on your own and ace the standardized tests and move on. I mean, I would have loved to be in a super-stimulating and challenging environment where I could move at my own accelerated pace instead of dragging back endlessly with the slowest kids in the class. It was frustrating and boring for me. But ultimately it didn’t matter in terms of my future success. I would go with put your kids in the public school (provided it isn’t super overcrowded and/or dangerous) and then supplement with tons of outside activities. Like for instance, I would have loved to do one of those “nerd camps” during the summer or something like that, and it sounds like the parents in the article could have afforded that. Living in NYC, you could go to museums every weekend, lectures, films, everything, a lot of it for free.
The article seemed to leave out the part about how much income the staying-home parent was missing out on by homeschooling. They said that the fancy pantsy private school was a little less than $40K a year. I mean, I know $40K is a lot of money, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to find a job that pays more than the cost of private school, especially if there are less expensive options? I’m not a New Yorker so I could be totally off here. It mostly sounded like the mom wanted to homeschool and they justified it by citing the cost of other options.
@ghechr The thought of spending 40k a year on an elementary school makes me never want to stop screaming, though. I mean, his wife could have worked and they could have moved to a neighborhood with better public schools. That I could handle. Working and spending your entire salary on tuition alone so your kid can be around rich kids makes me ill. You’d have to make a salary of around 70k to even net the 40k in NYC, and then to spend the whole thing on an elementary school for one kid, aaaaarrrrghhhhh!!!
@WaityKatie And also this family has at least three kids — reference to twins at the beginning of the article, and “our older sons” at the end.
I was homeschooled until 7th grade, and it has been tempting to pin all of my social awkwardness or loneliness or unhappiness on that, but what are the rest of your excuses? Like, I am sure many of you reading this spent a lot of your adolescent years feeling alienated and clueless about social things. Was it because you were not homeschooled?
I wouldn’t do it to my imaginary child, no. But I do acknowledge that it fostered positive aspects of my personality and values that might’ve otherwise been crushed.
@frenz.lo I always longed to be removed from my social misery/bullying in school, but on the other hand, I knew it would be just as bad/maybe even worse to be stuck with my parents all the time. There seems to be no solution.