(September 4, 2012 at 3:36 pm)teaearlgreyhot Wrote: What do you think of homeschooling? I was homeschooled from kindergarten all the way through high school mainly due to religious reasons. I'm not really sure what to think of homeschooling in general now that I'm no longer religious.
I must admit I find some people's notions of what homeschooling is rather strange. The idea that homeschoolers have no friends and are isolated from the world isn't necessarily true from my experience. Undoubtedly there have been a few cases like that but I was homeschooled in three different states and I never encountered a case like that but maybe my experience wasn't representative of the whole. I had many friends growing up, both homeschooled and public/schooled. The several hundred (maybe thousand, I grew up in Houston which is a large city) homeschoolers in the city I first lived in up to age 13 had many groups that met together each week, we had field trips (in my case the vast majority of the time to real museums, not always creationist places), many of us including myself went to a few special classes in subjects such as writing, or math. Our parents didn't teach us everything. We had textbooks for every subject in every grade. Even though many of our textbooks were done by Christian publishers, in subjects outside of biology or astronomy, it was just normal standard non-controversial things being taught with a few bible-verses thrown in that were loosely related to the subject. Some of our classes were taught and graded by real teachers. Like I took geometry and algebra in my high school years from a video tape series by some guy who worked at NASA. He graded our tests too.
Although not necessarily true for most homeschoolers, I had complete access to the TV and the internet. My whole family are trekkies and I grew up watching a lot of Star Trek. I think Star Trek is one of the influences that pushed me towards atheism.
I am a bit socially awkward. I have a hard time relating to most people in my age group but I have no difficultly talking to people older than me. Although I had several friends growing up, I have only one friend in real life now around my age and he too was homeschooled (but keep in mind I moved across the US two times in the span of 7 years so that didn't help in keeping friends). I'm not sure this is because of my homeschooling or not. It could just be because I'm a total geek.
I'm not trying to say homeschooling is great or better than attending a real school, however. Just sharing my experience.
(hope I'm not posting this on the wrong board)
I don't know a thing about home schooling. My preparatory school was a boarding school and so I was in an environment of many boys. I can't imagine not having a gang of boys to play rugby with (rugby is my favourite sport) and I can't imagine having lots of friends to talk to, to play pranks on, etc etc. Home schooling must be the opposite of a boarding school. I like life as a boarder so home schooling would be impossible for me.
