Homeschooling isn´t the answer

Hello, hello

I was scrooling on Youtube the other day and found this video from this channel called Thought Coutore about homeschooling, more specifically something called unschooling? You can check out their video on this link! She shows some examples and all around has some very interesting insights about the matter.

Before I start giving my opinion like it happended in Thought's Coutore video I'm going to tell my credentials I have a degree in Educational Sciences and I'm currently taking a masters in Special Education. So, I feel pretty good to talk about education.

Unschooling, what is it?

I'm from Portugal and even though I know what homeschooling is we don't hear a lot about it here. So, I did some research and discovered that it's legal here but very regulated. For your knowledge: here the parent or responsable for the child needs to have at least one degree to be able to take this role of a teacher; the children needs to be enrolled in a school because they are going to be assigned a teacher at that school that is going to evaluate the work; in the end the official test that every students needs to do to pass the year are also required to be done by this student. In my opinion, homeschooling in Portugal isn't worth it.

Then I start researching about homeschooling in the United States and discover that in some states you guys don't even regulate it? You mean to tell me that are children in your country that might not be receiving a quality education and you don't care? Bonkers

Now, unschooling it's this way of homeschooling where you don't follow a curriculum and let the children decide what they want to learn. A pattern that I have seen in parents that choose to unschool their children is a lot of anger towards the school system. "They don't have classes with hand on experiences" or "they don't foster creativity" and the classic "they only put them in front of a book". Look, I can point you to a lot of flaws in the mainstream school system, however, what this parents are creating aren't strong, smart, creative adults. Most of the children, unless they see their parents reading or doing math aren't going to by themselves feel the need to learn it. They can't be 8 years old reading and writing at the level of a 6 year old just because they didn't feel like it until recently to explore by themselves reading. I watched a video of a mom being so proud of her son, because he wrote leg, lamp and lion by himself by copying the words of a book. He was 6. His writing looked like a 4 year old. And he didn't learn how to write those words. He doesn't know that "li" plus "on" makes the word lion. That mom also said that his son without following a curriculum started having interest in maths by asking what's 5 + 7. She answered and now he knows. Yes, he does now that 5+7 is 12 he doens't know how 5 + 7 is 12.

Another mom on tiktok has doing a whole speech how she created her account about homeschooling to find people that think like her and have the some opinions as her. Sounds healthy lady, I'm sure that your son is going to learn a lot by only having acess to one way of thinking

Who's at fault?

Like I said, most of these parent's blame the public school for their weak education and not having hands on classes or just seating them in front of a book. But, their anger is being targeted to the wrong instituition. You want better schools? Vote for someone that cares about education. Teachers are overworked and fewer so they have classes with enourmous numbers of students, it's hard to help every single one. You want more lab classes for your kid but hey, the school received their funding and the lab material were cut by half so... More outdoor activities but the gym needs repairs.

In conclusion, you want to homeschool your kid because school nowadays are bad? Take that energy and resentment towards congresspersons that don't fund education.

Want to read more of my work? Check out my writing about "Teenage pregnancy and drop out culture" and "The use of colours in West Side Story (1961)"

See ya,

JP