Okay, yeah, I’m wrong here. I thought the statement that the name calling lasted for a year meant that the ignored assignment was left unpunished. Don’t really know why I thought that, now that I read it again.

To be fair, your question was ambiguous.

Considering they won’t even hold kids back a grade here anymore, I could see it. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the curve of home schooled kid intelligence has two peaks, one corresponding to parents who make their best effort and another corresponding to the ones you’re talking about.

That’s why I added all the stuff in the footnote. Haha. When I was a kid, we did home schooling because the area we were initially living had a lot of trouble of with knives and guns in the school, and then we started moving around so much it wasn’t feasible to really get a decent education at a new school ever several months.

But the books that the state of Virginia told my mom to get ended up being a beka books, creationist nonsense. When my mom realized what they were she started getting me text books from library (we had settled down to only moving within the Hampton roads area by then). That indoctrination and shitty education is so rampant within homeschooling that even the state has given up on recommending decent material.

All that said, my mom (who, just to throw it out there because of comments downstream, did not finish highschool) was an amazing teacher. She instilled a love of learning in her kids, but honestly the most important thing I got from my education was learning how to learn. I feel like other kids learned how to pass tests, I learned how to absorb information and retain it, and how to actually find the information I need.

I also didn’t take summers off, so I finished 12th at 14, which was, frankly, really fucking awesome. Lol. I used to get through an entire day’s worth of course work before noon, and then I got to what we called free research. Which was basically “you can use the computer until 5pm, but it has to be at least tangentially educational.” My God I read so much Wikipedia.

I wish I could be a proponent of homeschooling, because I know how fantastic it can be. But I can’t, because the bad parents make it so, so much worse than anything that should be acceptable. We used to go to homeschool clubs, and even group teach (basically a class run by one of the parents with 15 or so kids, mostly as a way to get the other parents a few hours of free time), but had to stop because I would get in trouble with the other parents for saying things like “evolution” or on one occasion how condoms are a great way to prevent STDs. It sometimes felt like we were entirely alone in having a decent education in that system. We weren’t, we met many, many other families with decent homeschooling techniques and actual science classes. But the ones who weren’t? They were absolutely the loudest.