this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Homeschool isn't only at home, though. My kids, and all of the other homeschooled kids I know are out at some activity, museum or educational "thing" at least twice a week. Depending on their age, they can also volunteer or work somewhere that interests them. For example, my oldest loves reading, so she volunteers at the library once a week, where she gets to meet people of all ages.
Also, it's much easier to travel when you're homeschooling. You can go pretty much anywhere anytime as you don't have to be back home before school starts. As an example, we recently came back from a year on our sailboat traveling up and down the US East coast and the Bahamas. My kids spoke a different language (we're not anglophone), tasted different foods, met people from all the places we saw, but also from all over the world (you tend to meet a lot of other travelers when you travel), saw incredibly diverse fauna and flora, made friends incredibly quickly, etc. How's that for a microcosm?
Homeschooling's biggest misconception is that it's at home, when in reality, it's wherever you are. It's like remote work for kids.
But Museums aren't what school prepares kids for once they're adults. It's the conflict with lots of other kinds of people and learning how to navigate that in my opinion.
You're not wrong but you picked "museum" and ignored "volunteering at library" where they meet many kinds of people, learn to help them with their problems, learn to navigate an office environment, etc.
Sounds great until they get to university and have the culture shock realizing not everybody else grew up on a sailboat traveling the coast.
Why would they expect that? I've not seen any culture shock at college from homeschoolers, except perhaps being surprised at the amount of shenanigans that are gotten up to.
Kind of a poor take. "Don't have an amazing first part of your life because the rest won't be equally amazing."
A year long vacatipn on a sailboat? That sounds like a great microcosm for the 1%. So if those are the circles your kids will be running in as adults rather than the average working person's circles it probably is a great microcosm.
It's cheaper than you think. My sailboat is an old thing from the 80s that was cheaper than most RVs, I was working remotely (so not an actual vacation) and anchoring is free.
Yeah, you do need to have some money, but it's not only for millionaires. Look up Uma on Youtube, they got started by buying a boat with the money they were going to use for a couch. They're rolling in that Patreon dough right now, but when they started they didn't have much.