I don't think it's always the case for home schooled kids. But the ones who are forced to pioneer and home school entirely on their own are robbed of so many experiences and of a well rounded education. The girl that I knew personally, her parents worked full time and she was either in service with other uneducated persons, or was home alone supposedly Doing her school work Independantly. This was before the internet, so her world was very limited.
Baptized at a young age, homeschooled, and pioneered ...
by Wild_Thing 15 Replies latest jw friends
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karter
Seems you parents were trying to protect you from the big bad "World"
Saddly alot of homeschooled J.W children end up being isolated and scared of their own shadow and when they have to go out into the "World" they have no idear.
The parents think they are protecting them but their just as many bad people ind=side the J.W's as out.
Karter.
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zeb
pale emperor. "always trying to prove they were clever and not stupid" ..sounds like terribly insecure teen time is a troubled time in itself but to keep your kids in an eggs shell is not doing them any favours. and as we have seen in recent months there are bad people in the wt as there are out.
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jwfacts
I think homeschooling is such a sad thing for a child. How many parents are equiped to spend the time and have the skills to properly educate a child in all the areas covered at school. Interaction with other school children is also a great way to learn how to deal with people in general. If a parent is diligent it providing the right education, and the child has a lot of friends at the kingdom hall it may work out alright, but it is particularly isolating if there are few children of the same age at that hall.
I am interested in how those that were homeschooled now feel about it, and how well they fit into work life and building friendships.
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Rainbow_Troll
I was home schooled for a while, but I was not forced into it. When I broke my arm around age 12 after falling off the garage roof, the bone had to be set and then put in a heavy cast for about six weeks so it could mend. Naturally, this would be impossible if I had to attend a school where I constantly had to defend myself from bullies; so my mom and everyone else agreed that I should be allowed to do all my school work at home. After trying it for six weeks, I decided it wasn't so bad and later signed on for permanent independent study status.
Academically speaking, I can't say it was any better or any worse than attending public school. The books I studied from were exactly the same. I am aware that some Christian parents are actually able to exclude books from their child's curriculum that mention evolution, but I never knew any home schooled children in which this was the case (perhaps it was illegal in my state).
Some people on here have mentioned the social aspect. While I will concede that being exposed to people of different cultures could give a JW some perspective on their own beliefs and lifestyle, I think just watching television or reading non-JW material could easily serve the same purpose. I would say that, if anything, being a JW in school just reinforced my programming. Not being allowed to participate in class activities that involved holidays, patriotism, sports or evolution just made me stand out and feel even more alienated. What really opened my eyes wasn't interacting with kids of other faiths, but reading books written by adults who actually knew enough about the Bible and Christianity to make an intelligent critique of them.
Maybe there are some decent public schools out there, but if there are they must be pretty rare since I attended six that were all pretty bad (though some were worse than others). I can't imagine how any parent, no matter how apathetic or anti-intellectual they might be, could possibly do a worse job of educating their child than the typical American public school. The only conclusion that I can draw from my experiences with both public school and home school is that, unless their parents could have afforded to send them to a private school, children who are home schooled aren't missing out to any significant degree.
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Saethydd
I very nearly was like that, I was baptized at 10, started homeschooling in 7th grade so I could pioneer with my mother and sister, but the three of us could never really get motivated, and then a couple of years later I was privately reproved and didn't end up having the restrictions from that raised until about 8 months before I got disfellowshipped. In that time I'd decided to get started on college classes and am very glad I did. I would definitely say it hurt me to homeschool instead of go to a normal high school, I had to play a lot of catch up with my math classes because I didn't do enough algebra on my own to really learn it. I'm a little behind where I'd like to be in my education but it could've been so much worse. Though my parents took virtually no part in my education, I taught myself and scheduled all my learning time without barely any input from them at all except for occasionally nagging me a bit when I fell behind.