Re:Second-generation homeschooling (Score 2)

I was home schooled (more specifically, I switched from public school to home schooling in early 5th grade after public schools tried normal track, advanced placement, and then special ed in that order). Why? My public school experience can be summed up this way: I would excel in every new subject for the first week, get way ahead of the class, get bored, and drop to the bottom. Happened in every year, and every class. Special ed was the only place they had smaller classrooms, but they also had bigger challenges and lower standards so I was ignored. Add getting into arguments over things like access to the full school library instead of what they considered age appropriate, and my parents decided it would be better to have me pursue knowledge in my own way. Which I did. College was a breeze and after a successful career in tech and I now own a small business.

Not only do I home school, but I specifically chose not to have kids until/unless I was in a position where I could home school. I run my business in large part because it allows me to dedicate time to the kid's education, which I couldn't do when I worked in the corporate world. So I suppose you could say I'm not only doing the second-generation thing, but it was important to me.

Why? It's not just the desire as an atheist to avoid religious fruitcakes in school administration, though that's a factor because we live in a fruitcake factory of a town. It's not just that my kid is diagnosed severe ADHD and "probably level 1 autism but I won't diagnose that unless you need it for public school accommodations" according to the doctor who did the ADHD eval (a diagnoses I'd probably have been given too, but it was a different age). It's not that, between the state and the local district policies, the public schools have decided that standard accommodations that kids used a year or two ago are unacceptable so all the local parents with ADHD kids are freaking out. Those are important to me, but so are many other things.

The main factor is that I wanted my kid to have a chance to develop into whatever they are best is, rather than being forced into a mold of whatever some business thought they wanted future employees to be (back when they were planning on needing employees in the future). I want my kid to learn how to learn, and how to think critically, and to have important foundational knowledge from the start. Knowledge like logical problem solving, cooking, self-advocacy, time management when you don't have an external framework propping you up, and so on. My kid is 6 and my focus is on engaging interest and building tools for lifelong learning. There aren't any subjects I force them into, but at the same time there aren't any subjects I'll let the kid ignore. I have the time for one-on-one engagement, and a lot of opportunities to guide what they experience of the world right now, so it's fairly easy to build "you don't know you are learning about ___________ but you are" experiences (especially since I'm not trying to do it for 20-30 kids at a time). To be clear, it isn't easy. Home schooling my kid is one of the most challenging things I've ever done, and there are times when I envy my parents for offloading the first 5 years onto public education, but my hope is that the kid will end up with the broadest range of options possible for their life. That's not every parent's goal but it is mine - give them the tools to succeed at being what they want to be.

Of course, viewed from an opportunity cost lens the kid's education is probably costing over $100,000 a year right now (I could easily take home an extra $100k by going to an office job and putting the kid in public schools), and that's a luxury I acknowledge isn't available to everyone, but it's also something I spent years (before a kid was anything but an idea to me) putting myself in a position to afford.