I disagree with homeschooling

I am a public school teacher. Let me tell you why I disagree with homeschooling (especially once they've reached the middle school age).

I bust my ass to create an environment in my classroom where kids want to learn. Sure, I'm somewhat constrained by standardized testing and such. But I'll be damned if any one of my students finish my class at the end of the year and regret taking it. I teach content, but more importantly I'm dedicated to teaching them what it means to be a productive citizen. I'm young, I'm full of enthusiasm, I'm extremely well versed in my content area. Just because you may have had a bad experience in public schools doesn't mean they're all like that.

Socializing is so unbelievably important to these kids. You can homeschool and monopolize your kid's perspective all you want, but someday they'll become adults and they are going to have to enter the real world. The real world has a lot of nice people and also a lot of assholes. Learning how to work and socialize with people that are different from you is an invaluable life skill. I just don't see how homeschooling gives kids this kind of experience.

There were a lot of public school teachers I had in the past that sucked. But there were also a lot of teachers I had that were amazing, and showed me ways of looking at the world that I never dreamed of. I like to think that a big part of knowledge is exposing yourself to many different perspectives, and then grabbing a little bit of your personal conceptual framework from each of them. I just don't see how this can be accomplished through homeschooling.

If you live in an area where the public schools are atrocious, that's one thing. I'm not saying there aren't a lot of good reasons to homeschool your children. But to paint a brushstroke across the entire public school system is ridiculous. There are a lot of young teachers out there like me that are trying to make a difference. Keep in mind too that pedagogy has really changed a lot since when your former public school teachers went through college.