Back to Skool Q & A

11-08-2020 • 1 hr 19 mins

“The percentage of students who were homeschooled doubled from 1999 to 2012, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That increase leveled off in 2016, when about 1.7 million students were estimated to be homeschooled.”

I cannot even begin to imagine how big of an increase in homeschoolers we are going to see this month, but I’m sure it will be massive, and I’m sure there will be a lot of pushback from the supporters of the public school system monopoly. For example, in May, Harvard Magazine published an article titled ‘The Risks of Homeschooling’. It was a pathetic attempt and they even misspelled arithmetic in the graphic. Some may think, “well maybe they were making fun of how dumb homeschooled children are”, but they actually corrected it later, so…anyway.

This has been a hot topic in the last few months and we have gotten countless questions on it for a while now. Right now, there is a lot of discussion over children and schools, and how they plan to open back up again. Frankly, a lot of people are terrified about the potential consequences of changing how children do school. We are on uncharted territory and this is a huge experiment, and while we have heard all about the masks, social distancing, and for lack of a better word bubble wrapping of our children to reduce the risk of contracting a virus with a 0.2% mortality rate (and it approaches zero with children), I haven’t seen much talk on what the implications of implementing this on developing brains.

How will their social development be affected when they can’t receive non-verbal cues from their classmates or their teachers because everyone is masked up? There is a LOT to unpack there, and I personally won’t touch it because to us, it’s irrelevant. We mourn with all of the parents who simply cannot make homeschooling work, but we will stick to our wheelhouse, and that is helping those who do want to start homeschooling. We have done several episodes on our podcast and others on our philosophy, the history of schooling, and other important education information, so we encourage you to scroll through our podcast feed and check those out. But today we will focus on the practical stuff. We asked you for questions and boy did you all deliver.

Important links:

https://www.fatfueled.family/podcast/2018/10/9/episode-6-education-philosophy

https://www.fatfueled.family/podcast/2018/10/16/episode-7-dr-anthony-jay

https://www.fatfueled.family/podcast/2018/10/30/episode-9-matt-beaudreau

https://www.fatfueled.family/podcast/outsidethebox

https://www.fatfueled.family/podcast/radical-unschooling

www.allinonehomeschool.com

www.ronpaulcurriculum.com

www.xtramath.org

www.philosophyforchildren.org

https://harvardmagazine.com/2020/05/right-now-risks-homeschooling

https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/tim-tebow-reflects-breaking-ground-homeschool-student-pretty-50742055