I was homeschooled as a child, from 1st through 12th grade, in a large homeschooling community from the late 1980s through the 1990s. I started college in 2000.
I heard all the stories about how homeschooled kids get better standardized test scores and generally enter college with fewer remedial courses, better academic outcomes, etc. I heard all the arguments that "actually, we do socialize, because we can still do Scouts and sports and blah blah blah."
It was all horse shit.
I do not know a single homeschooling family that did not have an issue with the parents eventually slacking off on checking up that the kids were doing the work. And, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the kids just skipped doing any work for most of the year. There would be a mad scramble at the end of the year to concoct a fraudulent portfolio to present to the state-required evaluator. And when the dust settled and all the spankings were done and all the tears were dried, new promises were made to not do it next year. New threats were made that you could "get up at 6am and get on that bus."
It took me until my 40s to realize it wasn't my fault. The people who were the responsible party--i.e. my parents--stopped acting responsibly. The person who is so incapable of being responsible that the state won't even let them drink, drive, or vote (all activities infinitely easier than trying to teach yourself)--i.e. my self--was the one who had all the blame lumped on him.
This wasn't a unique experience. I think maybe 1 kid out of the 30 I knew did not have this experience at least once in their homeschooling life. That one kid was perhaps the smartest, most mature of us; or perhaps she just feared her parents the most. She's also dead now, having killed herself in her early 30s.
For me, it was 4 times.
It was incredibly traumatizing. I lived the first 20 years of my adult life believing I was fundamentally a dishonest and untrustworthy person, and therefore unworthy of anything, especially love and career success. What I was was an irresponsible kid, aka "a kid", who had practically no supervision.
Every parent always said publicly they were doing it for academic reasons. In private, amongst themselves, the true reasons came out: sequestration away from "unauthorized" religious, political, and social ideas. And it always, always leaned right. We couldn't go to school because they were Teaching Evolution As If It's Fact When It's Just A Theory At That School. We couldn't go to school because Ever Since The Immigrants Started Moving Here To Take All The Apple Picking Jobs The Crime Has Been Through The Roof At That School (what the local family practice doctor cared about apple picking jobs, I could never figure out as a child). We couldn't go to school because They're Teaching Homosexuality Is Not An Abomination At That School.
Meanwhile, every single child I grew up with had to face a cliff moment where they had to decide if our collective experience was abusive. The few of us who said yes managed to get through college without dropping out, get moved away from home, get through rounds of suicidal ideation, self-medicating, therapy, antidepressants, and maybe eventually coming to terms and having happy productive lives.
Or they said no, it was fine, and they now live in poverty, have broken homes, still-active alcoholism, or are dead from suicide.
My own mother might be developing dementia and doesn't seem to recall at all things my sister and I agree we remember clearly. Things I've heard my friends repeat in their own stories. Things they've said their own parents also deny. I grew up incredibly lonely. My parents not only sequestered my sister and I from our municipal community, but also to some extent from our homeschooling community, because the one silver lining about my own particular experience was that my parents were not religious zealots. I grew up in constant fear of the State taking me away from my parents just because my mother took me to the grocery store during school hours (a thing my mother asserted could happen, so I better behave to not draw attention to us). I grew up believing society was going to collapse at any time. I grew up believing I was certainly going to Hell because, even though my parents claimed to be religious, we didn't go to church.
To this day, despite the intellectual knowledge that I'm really no different than anyone else, I still cannot shake the feeling that I'm always the outsider looking in, always the interloper trying to masquerade inside, and decode the secret workings of, the social groups I'm in.
This is incredibly difficult for me to talk about. There are many things I still cannot talk about, so please resist the online commentator urge to infer things about my current relationships.
I see people today talking about "we're thinking of homeschooling our children." Not just online, but in my own community, too. I want to scream at them that they have no idea what a gigantic mistake they are entering into. Even assuming they can avoid the dishonest reasoning for why they are doing it, even assuming they will perfectly execute an educational plan for their children over the course of 12 years, they are at the vet least forcing an outsider's complex on their children.
Yes, parents who send their children to public school could still be abusive. Yes, children who do go to public school also develop outsider complexes and plenty of other mental health issues. But at least the child will have a better chance to see that there are alternatives. At least the child will have a better chance to learn that they are a member of a shared society. At least the child will have a better chance to become independent from their parents.