i've talked about this before but it's been a while: i was homeschooled my entire life, except for a brief period of a few months when my parents sent me to public school, and it was a massive culture shock around learning for me
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The biggest thing I remember was how much time was wasted. I remember standing around, waiting for teachers to talk, my life existence was just soaked up and poured down the drain, time i could have been spending doing other vivid, skill-building stuff
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The amount of learning I did at school took SO much more time. At home, I sat down with my books and did my work usually in between 2-4 hours. At school that same amount of work could often take two DAYS.
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i spent my extra time at home developing my own skills. I read books nonstop, wrote fantasy fiction, learned to juggle, i taught myself how to carve wood and build crafts and photoshop and learned in a huge amount about personality systems
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and maybe you'd be like, but aella you're kinda weird, most kids would just play videogames
and maybe you're right, but also maybe you would play videogames too if for your entire life, all the learning you'd done was forced onto you by other people
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in the years after i left home, i made friends with people who'd gone to school, and our difference in attitudes towards learning was super obvious. I was really *active* about exploring and learning from my environment, and they tended more towards learned helplessness
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i had never learned shame around nerdiness or loving learning. For me, learning and education had been much less associated with trying to please a system or teachers, it wasn't about being uncool. It was just a natural state of being, like walking or breathing.
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and tbf I wasn't unschooled; there was still a lot of "parents forcing me to learn this thing" - it just took up a much smaller fraction of my life. I can't *believe* that most kids do this for the majority of their waking hours, that's insane to me.
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This sounds like obliviously bragging about either having intellectual parents with free time or wealthy parents.
We should campaign for smaller classes tbh. It sounds like 80% of homeschooling advantages boil down to "teacher doesn't have to teach to the slowest of 30 people"
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I lived really far away from any other kids and school was the only place I had to hang out with equals. It took me until like 20 to become a functioning social animal, I was starved of social interaction. If I had been homeschooled, I would be totally non-functional.
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if your parents don't make an effort to find community for you i agree it can be bad. but there's tons of homeschooling communities, and i was regularly well socialized with other homeschoolers.
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