Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

I've considered homeschooling but ultimately decided against it because:

A - It's illegal where I live, you have to jump hoops to do it B - I think an extra opportunity for socialising with kids is worth a bit of pain - we wouldn't have the energy for organising alternatives and also take care of the kids education C - By sending kids to a nice private school you get rid of a lot of problems of public school: unmotivated / openly hostile and punishing teachers, classmates with bad behaviour disrupting class, immigrant classmates who don't speak the language and / or create gang of people from the same country to gang up on kids (exactly like in prison)

When I went to school things weren't as bad as today and kids were not getting stabbed in public school, still it felt like a prison because of the slow learning pace and because everyone learns at a different pace and wants to learn about different things. School is simply the wrong idea for the majority of boys, it's just a silly machine that print mindless employees.

The strongest reason for not sending them to school is the latest EU mandatory gender theory / sexual education propaganda being taught to kids in school since last year.

Ultimately I decided that years of socialisation with peers trumps a few lessons about political BS; I'm confident I can teach them to distrust authority and teach them that they cannot trust blindly everything they hear in school or on the newspaper.

My friends who pursued illegal homeschooling are quite happy, they even found a teacher who is teaching kids illegally in someone's home, and by grouping the kids together across multiple families they have a soft school experience.

It's like all the people that insist "School never taught me anything useful like how to balance a check book" when you learned how to balance a checkbook in the math class that person never paid attention to.

I'm sick and tired of being told what school is good and bad for by the very people who never paid attention. A school cannot magically make you motivated to learn things for 16 years. It's drudgery to most humans and always be, because we aren't naturally """meant""" to learn complicated and robust concepts for 16 years.

Our options are deal with that and help kids who don't want to learn do things they don't want to do, or have a general populace that knows nearly nothing about the world around them.

>We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results.

It would depend on what you're asking for. It depends on the school district/state, but anything that gets close to the curriculum isn't easy or simple to change.

For example, one of my kids who went to public school had to use this program (I forget the name) for algebra that the school paid for. You used a weird toolbar to input your equations that appeared to be some monstrous Javascript nightmare. It more or less worked, but it wasn't great. To my mind it would have been simpler to teach them LaTeX or something, but whatever.

As a parent, you can't go in and say "why don't you just let them write the answers on paper like everybody else did until 9 minutes ago?" The teachers loved this program, because it did all the teacher work for them. The school administration already paid for it, plus paying for the computers for the kids to use, plus the IT overhead to keep the computers running.

That's a fundamental structural problem that no parent can surmount. "What do you mean use a screwdriver? We paid for all these hammers!"

The incentives that drive public education are often orthogonal to actually teaching the public. It's not a mystery, any trough where money collects will get snouts rooting for some of it. The parents don't have much say in how all this money must be spent because they don't have any say about the money at all, other than moving to a different district or writing off what they pay in property taxes and paying again to do something else.

I went to a public school and regarded it as prison, no bullying went on, but the system is not designed to educate, it is designed to instill obedience, and the pace of learning is dictated primarily by mediocrity of the teachers(I had a rare great 5th grade teacher so this is why I think the the teachers more so than the students abilities dictates the results).

People recommending private school: these do not exist in all locations, try finding a good one in a rural area

It seems standards in public schools have only fallen since I attended, and based on how social media is trending, we seem to be getting dumber and less informed.

I could never force a child to attend public school in the US, unless it happened to be one of the rare good ones I hear exist.

If we ever get something like what is described in "The Diamond Age" perhaps that will help solve the school problem.

I'd love to read about your experience doing this!