In the 2024-2025 school year, homeschooling continued to grow across the United States, increasing at an average rate of 5.4%. This is nearly three times the pre-pandemic homeschooling growth rate of around 2%. Notably, 36% of reporting states recorded their highest homeschool enrollment numbers ever — exceeding even the peaks reached during the pandemic.
Is it good or bad? Does it provide a better education while school is unable, or people are just lazy shits and don’t go to school?
Real bad once you learn about homeschooling resources.
The movie Mean Girls (2004) did a pretty good summary of the different kinds of home-schooled kids in the first few minutes of the movie.
On average bad, since often a major reason for homeschooling is instilling a greater degree of fundamentalist religious belief while preventing access to a diversity of alternative viewpoints in a classroom setting.
It’s really all over the place depending on the student, the parents, the homeschooling program they’re using, etc.
I once worked with a guy who homeschooled his kids because their housing situation was a little unstable. It probably provided them a bit of stability they wouldn’t have had otherwise since they probably would have had to change schools a lot with all of the moving around.
Other kids may benefit from it if they’re not doing well in a regular school environment, have disabilities, are gifted, etc.
In other cases it can be very isolating and they miss out on a lot of socialization with other kids their age
And some parents use it to control what their kids are learning to force political or religious agendas on them.
I don’t have a definitive answer for this but I suspect the answer is “it depends”. My brother homeschooled for a number of years because he was very bright scholastically and it worked better for him. I tried it for a year but it didn’t work nearly as well so I went back to regular school.
All that being said, homeschooling can and is used by some hyper religious parents which can have pretty bad consequences for the children.
This is great for fascists and nationalists. Get the poor dump ones to be even dumber and poorer while getting those with money and conservative values the support they need from religious/fundamentalist programs.
Perfect recipe of a divided America.