Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

While I appreciate the author's perspective, esp as someone who experienced homeschooling, I think here in the US we often forget what these efforts have cost, their real value and who is lobbying against them.

Universal education, for all children in a nation, is an incredibly recent thing. Its also essential for real participation in a democracy which requires, at minimum, an understanding of the governing body and at maximum whatever we're slogging through now. Could the curriculum be better? Definitely. You know who is stopping that? Shit politicians. We need better ones because no matter what you think, they aren't going away,

Education has also continuously and purposefully been underfunded and politicized by the political right and intermittently eviscerated by corrupt players on the left and right. This is on purpose. The rise of homeschooling is directly correlated with how much funding public schools have lost, the lack of safety and how difficult it is to operate successfully. You now send the kid to school and get cut with a thousand small asks for cash when we could just revise how taxes are collected and distributed. Put out a gun ban. We don't need metal detectors, and cops and clear backpacks and active shooter drills and teacher trainings and and and. We need LESS GUNS and most americans agree but private industry is limiting us.

The rise of homeschooling is correlated with how many people are concerned about the politicization of schools, their libraries, their teachers, their cirruculum.

We keep having presidents who appoint leaders to the department of education who do not believe in education being available for all citizens. Schools continue to expand their mission to feeding kids who can't be fed. To programs for kids who can't be home. No one seems as focused on fixing why there are so many hungry kids instead focusing on a 'lunch account' and the debt of middle schoolers.

This is all intensely documented and yet another example of cutting a public good. A public good by the way, that made America a place that everyone in the world wanted to go. Yes, I got picked on in school and was bored in my classroom. Yes it could have been better. This though, this is a concerted effort to get us to divest once again, just like we are from net neutrality, the post office, the EEOC etc.

This is such a narrow view of homeschooling as to be idiotic.

> That voice likes to say: You should just homeschool them. Opt out of interacting with average people, because average people will only damage your kids.

The author makes a statement about why they think people prefer homeschooling, and yet they do not mention having spoken to a single currently homeschooling parent to ask why they homeschool. This is like me writing an article about some group I'm not a part of (say, farmers) and saying "why don't they all get organic certified? As far as I can tell it's because most farmers don't like nature."

tl;dr: this is a completely uninformed tirade from someone who unfortunately had a bad experience with their religious upbringing, which involved homeschooling, and is generalizing the negative emotions towards all homeschoolers whatever their reason for opting out of school. Ironically this article that's ostensibly criticizing homeschooling parents as snobs is dripping with disdain and condescension.

The reductive & random assumption that people opt out of school they object to the students is baffling to me. Does it not occur to the author that people take issue with institutionalization of their kids in school? It's not the other children, it's the one-size-fits-all meat grinder of school most secular homeschool parents object to.

Bonus: The footnotes are hilarious. The footnote to their argument that people homeschool because they're snobs is:

> I don’t think I’m straw-manning, because I’m pretty sure someone is going to highlight the “opt out of interacting with average people” quote on Twitter/X and say “this, but unironically.”

"I don't think I'm inventing a weak interlocutor to argue against because I've invented another imaginary person on twitter who agrees with the first imaginary person I created" I'm honestly laughing reading this.

>It's also to teach you how to cooperate,

Cooperation requires shared goals. I can't cooperate with someone when we're not sharing goals. Young students don't have shared goals other than "survive in this classroom for 11 months out of a calendar year". So there's no lessons in cooperation.

>how to reach consensus,

Of what use is consensus, without shared goals? Sounds more like indoctrination.

>how to make decisions as a group,

Same as above.

>These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.

These skills are actually being used to murder civilization/society, even as we speak. The current fertility rate is sub-replacement, but the children being indoctrinated in public schools are being indoctrinated to be even less fertile than that. Many will grow up to be and remain childless as adults, and as that happens, society will not replace those people who are dying of old age. Society then dies itself just decades later. Your society, such as it is, is absurdly dysfunctional. I suppose if one were to define "properly functioning" as "polite to a fault" or "as peaceful as cattle trudging down the slaughterhouse chute"...

It took way less than 100 years to eradicate illiteracy, and further improvement followed. However, as soon as a system is established, the forces that corrupt that system start acting, finding ways to exploit it to their own advantage. Then, as special interests (politics, unions) take over, the quality stagnates and then decays.

I have many teachers in both my immediate and extended family. All of the ones who aren't retired say the same thing: the quality of parents is in the absolute shitter in two major aspects: parents don't want to teach their children anything they see as "the school's job" such as how to read or work on anything with their children at home. The second way is discipline. They instill no values of discipline or respect for the rights of others in their children. The "back of the room peanut gallery" that was one in ten or one in twenty children when I was young has grown to one in three. These are kids who've never seen negative consequences for anything they've ever done and steadfastly believe that will continue into their adulthood.