Homeschool World Forum

[exhomeschool]

Hi.

I am a 9th grader, who stopped homeschooling at the end of 8th grade (I started in 4th), because of the antisocial aspect of it. Now, the high school I am at has very high ratings; one of the highest in the county, in fact. However, and I mean no offense to any public school teachers...a lot of people that went to public middle school are stupid. Just plain and simple, stupid.

It's not even that I'm taking easy classes. It's that public schools teach for the standardized test, not for the sake of learning. When I was homeschooled, besides learning what I had to learn, I would go out and research and study subjects that interested me. I began to teach myself Latin, and got very involved with the programming/computer science community in my area. In fact, one of the few good parts of my school is my AP Computer Science teacher, who believes as I do: that the policy of "if it's not needed on the test, the school system doesn't include it in the curriculum" is ridiculous. My Latin class, however, is just full of obnoxious upperclassmen who take the language to get better scores on the SAT. Those are my criticisms of public school.

There are good parts of public high school. There are sports to play, and many more people. I have gained many friends since entering high school, and even been in a couple of relationships, so I am caught between these two forms of schooling.

I would say that if you want more learning and less social activity, go home. But if you want to be able to constantly interact with people, and have many different mentors, go to school.

[Theodore]

Thing is, you can get the good studying in at home AND have the social activities after school hours. My siblings have been active in Civil Air Patrol, swim team, Tae Kwon Do, assorted conventions (mostly gaming and anime), etc. School is for studying, and if it's not doing a good job with that, then there's not much point to going. You can get better-quality social interaction elsewhere.

EDIT: The exception would be if you're a type-A personality and really enjoy beating others in academics. In that instance, school may provide more motivation, assuming the teachers are halfway decent.
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