That may be true, but way more kids get sent to school then are home schooled, so that doesn't mean much on its own.
The issue is that when a kid's at school, there are many people who may notice something's wrong. From teachers, school nurses, school administrators, and even other kids. This is by no means perfect, and many, many cases of abuse slip through the cracks. But it is something, which is more then many home schooled kids have.
While I'd wager most home schooled kids aren't abused, the fact of the matter is it's much easier for an abusive parent to cover up their abuse if their child is home schooled. You may still feel home schooling is a net positive, but this aspect is very hard to deny.
Homeschooling requires some degree of investment in the child, even just to keep them occupied or tolerate their presence. School provides free childcare for long periods of time. I don't think the majority of abusive parents will ever homeschool their children, because most are not believers in teaching an abusive ideology but rather have simple personality disorders. "Homeschool makes it easier to hide abuse" presupposes that abusive parents are planning or organizing abuse which is plainly not true in the majority of cases.
Like the Satanism panics of the 1990s demonstrate, elaborate imaginings of complex sadistic rituals that are necessarily rare[0] bordering on nonexistent, tend to capture the public mind and suck oxygen away from treating the totally unattractive (not even in the capacity of making for a true crime special) real problems.
If you want to see this on TV, the last season of The Wire was about it.
[0] There were actually a spate of ritual killings in Liberia through the 1970s, proving humanity capable at least and making the issue to be one of reasonableness.
Unfortunately, of the 4 people I know personally who were homeschooled, it was a vehicle for abuse for 3 of them.
One friend’s mom wouldn’t teach him the curriculum for months, and then when she knew a test was coming up she would make him study with her for 14 hours a day to try to cram it in. Then when he naturally performed poorly on state exams he was punished (often physically) for not trying hard enough. She regularly woke him up for classes when she wanted to be awake at 2 or 3 am, then later after her afternoon nap at 6 or 8pm. He grew up constantly tired, without a regular schedule of meals, and never made it to the group outings because he felt sick all the time.
Another friend’s mom just couldn’t be bothered to teach and just took her out on “learning” hikes with other homeschooling moms, never taught her anything, and wound up sending her back to public school with severely (I mean severely) underdeveloped skills after being held back for several years.
Neither of these parents I’m sure “planned” to abuse their children in this way. They just weren’t up for the task of teaching in the way that a child requires, and their own personal issues turned that into a larger problem. But my friends suffered for it.
I don't think it's ever going to be possible to separate the outcomes of homeschooling from the selection of parents who desire to homeschool, but this overall neutral study (I'm not really arguing that homeschooling is a great thing just that it is okay) doesn't find evidence of the three out of four thing that you encountered extending to the whole population. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8580227/
> negatively associated with college degree attainment (RR = 0.77, 95% CI: 0.67, 0.88) and possibly with greater risk of posttraumatic stress disorder.
I’m sure I’m just unlucky and that the 3/4 abuse ratio doesn’t hold for the broader population. Higher rate of PTSD is suspect though.
I've seen this sentiment mentioned many times. That at school "abuse is more likely to be noticed". But how much more likely? How likely is noticed abuse to be resolved in a meaningful way?
As an anecdote I have close family member that teaches younger elementary school grades. They have told me about signs of possible abuse they've seen but no available recourse.
I'm also aware that school is a also an environment where abuse occurs. How can we say that we are not exposing public school children to more abuse per capita than homeschooled? There is a school in my neighbourhood that often has the police called in. Lockdowns over students bringing in knives and attacking each other.
It would be good to know these things if making an argument that pivots on abuse.
One last anecdote. All the experiences I can remember having that I'd consider abuse occurred in either: school, work or public transit. Some were bad interactions with strangers in passing, other were more chronic (generally at school).
While it is true terrible things can happen to kids at home, you need stats to compare this with the alternative before a stance should be taken.
>As an anecdote I have close family member that teaches younger elementary school grades. They have told me about signs of possible abuse they've seen but no available recourse.
It's natural to want to stay out of things, especially if one doesn't know the procedure and worries about messing up a family's lives. But it's better for the people in charge of investigating cops abuse to decide the appropriate course.
As for how reporting happens, it depends on the state. In mine (Pennsylvania), all school employees are made well aware they're considered "Mandated Reporters." They are legally required to report any suspicions of child abuse, either through the state's website, phone line, local police, or the county agency responsible for child abuse cases. The suspected abuse victim doesn't need to say they're being abused or anything at all, the reporter doesn't even have to guess who the abuser is. If the reporter thinks there may have been abuse because they saw or learned about physical (e.g. bruises) or behavioral (e.g. afraid to go home) signs, they have to report it. Not reporting can led to misdemeanor or felony charges for the Mandated Reporter. Somebody who reported their suspicion is immune from civil or criminal liability, and protected from retaliation from the institution they work at, for the report (unless it can be shown they're using reports maliciously). They're also tested as confidential informants in any investigation.
The law also encourages "Permissive Reporters" to report suspected child abuse, but without threatening charges for not reporting. These reporters can do so anonymously.
All this info comes from my wife, who was a daycare teacher, and DuckDuckGo-ing "Pennsylvania mandated reporters."
Those same Pennsylvanian school teachers turn a blind eye to the abuse that happens right in front of them in their own classrooms. The law may require them to report abuse but it can't actually force them to; the teachers just pretend they didn't see anything and there is no penalty for this because how can you prove the teacher recognized something? It's a farce.
The number of substantiated (court ruling, protective order, etc) child abuse cases in 2022: around 5,000.
No other group, including doctors, police officers, and Child Protective Services themselves, made more reports. Only around 6% of the school employees' reports were substantiated, making their reports least likely to be substantiated. This leads me to believe school employees have a lower threshold for reporting a suspicion compared to other groups.
> over 10,000 Pennsylvanian school employees reported suspected child abuse to the state in 2022 alone
And they overlook 100x more students beating the shit out of each other. No, I won't cite it. I lived it, and I have relatives working in that system who say nothing has changed.
BTW there are more than 100k school teachers in Pennsylvania. 10k reports a year represents about 1 in 10 teachers making a single report a year. I retract my 100x remark, it's far worse than that.
When I read these kinds of comments, I can't help but wonder: did you attend a US public school? I went to probably an above average number of public schools growing up since my parents moved around a lot. There were differences between the big city and small town ones but there was one constant: violence and abuse. How should I expect teachers to notice a child being abused by parents when they turn the other way to abuse by other children happening, daily, right in front of them (sometimes even egged on by the teachers themselves).
If you adjust for scale, I would be utterly flabbergasted if home schooling had a higher per capita rate of abuse than actual public schools unless public schools have changed to the point of being utterly unrecognisable from the 80-90's when it was inflicted on me.
Thank you for stating the truth. No, if anything, the schools have gotten only worse from the statements we hear and behavior we see of our kids' public-schooled friends. I'm amazed at how normalized social abuse is in public schools in the US. When I talk to other parents about my amazement, they just stare, blink, and respond with "I don't think it is a big deal. This is how we all talk and treat each other.". :-O
My wife and I have home schooled our kids from their educational beginnings because of how bat-shit crazy and anti-social public schools were and continue to be.
Your opinion is anti-American and anti-human-rights. You get that, don't you?
The 4th amendment of the Constitution protects all of us from warrantless searches. If you turn public schools into a method of warrantless searches to ferret out criminal activity, then public schools become unconstitutional.
The strange thing is that you can probably turn public schools into a method of warrantless searches without actually codifying that in statute, without making any major changes to school policy. All you have to do is assert that this is one of the major benefits of public education, and get some large fraction of other Americans to believe the same thing.
> You may still feel home schooling is a net positive,
It's a net positive to undermine fundamental human rights?
The issue is that when a kid's at school, there are many people who may notice something's wrong. From teachers, school nurses, school administrators, and even other kids. This is by no means perfect, and many, many cases of abuse slip through the cracks. But it is something, which is more then many home schooled kids have.
While I'd wager most home schooled kids aren't abused, the fact of the matter is it's much easier for an abusive parent to cover up their abuse if their child is home schooled. You may still feel home schooling is a net positive, but this aspect is very hard to deny.