Over the years, I have been writing about misconceptions regarding the schooling process. The purpose of these posts is to explain why I disagree with various comments that I have heard people make about schooling. These are meant as personal thoughts rather than conclusive proof, and I will admit that I'm not always the best at explaining my thoughts. Regardless, I have decided that I should be willing to share these posts when I encounter someone online who makes an argument that I have already discussed.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many children found themselves at home when they normally would have been at school. During that time, it appears that education took a hit. This has frequently been misused as proof that most parents should not be homeschooling their children.
When the pandemic hit, not all parents responded in same way. Most simply embraced the idea that education would be on hold until they resumed. That doesn't show how well these parents would have done if they actually pursued homeschooling.
There were some parents who embraced a homeschooling approach during this downtime. They didn't always embrace existing standards. There were numerous reports of children during this time learning things that weren't typically covered in school.
This gap was actually short-lived. Schools started distance learning programs. The idea behind this was that conventional schooling would resume, but video would allow teachers to hold their classes at each student's home. By pretty much all measures, this was a failure.
A lot of the criticism surrounding homeschooling was actually aimed at problems associated with distance learning. Teachers criticized parents for the poor performance of students in a teacher-led environment. These supposedly horrible parents had very little say during this time.
It's not entirely fair to judge homeschooling based on what we saw during the pandemic. Even if parents embraced homeschooling, there were numerous limitations. For example, a lot of stores were closed, limiting options to acquire resources. There were also limits on where parents could take their children for educational purposes.
If we really insist on looking at the pandemic for evidence of this approach's performance, the most logical comparison is with distance learning. Distance learning was a colossal failure. Does anyone honest believe that parents who embraced homeschooling did even worse than distance learning?
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