I find it very strange that so many so-called anarchists seem to have an intense bigotry against homeschooling, and a strong belief in the superiority and benefit of public schooling. It seems inherently self-contradictory for those who should be fundamentally opposed to centralization, state control, and bureaucracy to embrace public schooling. It seems even more contradictory for those who should reject the regimentation of anyone's lives, the production of people as if by a factory, the structuring of their educational environment by nation-state propaganda, censorship, and corporate interests, and the dictation to any mind what they should learn, know, and be interested in to do so. And yet many do.
I think a large part of this is that in our present culture, the only subculture that has a big enough problem with the culture, structure, and/or teachings of public education, and which is simultaneously powerful enough to carve out concessions and exceptions to make taking their children out of that system possible, has been fundamentalist conservative Christianity. As a result, the homeschooling as a concept seems to be strongly associated with fundamentalist Christianity, bringing with it images of strict, abusive parents, social isolation, poor education, severe indoctrination, and limited life experience. However, obviously, homeschooling is a tool that can be used by others, and in fact I think for anarchists specifically, it offers many great advantages.
Public schooling acclimates children to a world of strict control of where they go and when at all times, of arbitrary control by random authorities, of control over what, when, and how they learn, of arbitrary systems of quantitative assessment being forced on them to make them legible to bureaucratic assessment and control, to police, to institutional punishment. They also raise children in, essentially, a locked cage with a vast mass of largely unsupervised peers, which creates almost prison-like social dynamics, including painful bullying, ostracism, peer pressure and conformism dynamics, and in essence all the absolute worst of the problems of communities, without any of the mitigating factors of adult emotional maturity and experience.
This creates adults who are often deeply and horribly scarred by their experience in numerous ways – think of all the people who learned they can be bullies because they were in high school, or the people who peaked in high school, or those who were savagely bullied and ostracised at the time and carried the trauma of that into adulthood, which can permanently harm their ability to socialize with other adults, or make them resentful – and who are also browbeaten and broken, either into submission or just into burnout and failure.
Public school also places the education of children under a centralized nation-state bureaucracy, and thus subject to political capture and control, and where the corporate nation-state is free to indoctrinate and propagandize them – more subtly than the hamfisted and obvious attempts of fundamentalists, but indoctrinate them just the same.
Additionally, the teaching model of public schools is just horrendous in my opinion: it's far more important to be very deeply knowledgeable and enthusiastic about a small number of things than it is to have a shallow, broad, and unenthusiastic knowledge about a large number of things, and public school, due to its one-size-fits all methodology, can't accommodate that style of teaching at all.
Those who have a small selection of topics that they're deeply interested in and knowledgeable about have something unique and specific to offer the world through that specialization, for two reasons. First, because that specialization – especially with how their individual preferences, other interests, and predilections will mix and change their investigation of any topic – is unique to them, not something many other people have. And second, because you can get exponentially better at a topic through studying it deeply, so they'll be far better in those specializations than other people are even in the sum of the various subjects they know shallow things about. This means they'll feel more purpose, direction, and meaning in their lives, as well as just being more useful to the people around them.
Additionally, by focusing on the selection of topics children are actually interested in, you follow and reinforce their love of learning and exploration. Whereas if you force them to learn an endless litany of factoids about subjects they literally couldn't care less about, they begin to associate learning with listlessness, boredom, resentment – with having things shoved down their throats, with rote memorization, with painful hours bent over a book that is quite literally boring them to tears. This killing of their love of learning is a large part of how we've created such an ignorant, unempathetic, dull society of drones
Implicit in the foregoing is the idea that learning must be student-directed: the job of the teacher should be to teach them how to think, how to read, how to understand, how to remember, how to organize information, how to find it, how to identify reliable sources and cross-reference things, and in general how to be an autodidact; then to keep the curiosity of the students perpetually fed with a feast of reliable textbooks and information as they ask questions, as well as to suggest new avenues of inquiry, or suggest when they may have misunderstood something. The job of the teacher should not be to assign, and certainly not to assign a vast, shallow sea of uninteresting and factory-produced slop for students to consume.
Obviously some general broad base of knowledge is needed, but it should probably be much more limited then it is, and should be provided through the encouragement of students to explore the links between the subjects they're interested in and other subjects, or to satisfy their natural curiosity about the world, which should do enough to provide students with a decent base of general knowledge. Where it does not, we must remember that this is the 21st century, and the vast wealth of textbooks, encyclopedias, and courses available online – if someone knows how to learn, how to identify trustworthy sources, and how to think critically, the internet is a treasure trove. We just don't teach people how to do that in public school, not really.
Furthermore, the strictures of public schooling, with deadlines and due dates, tests with no second chances, quantitative assessments and grades, and all the rest of it, is a recipe for horrible stress and anxiety in students. No one learns well under a deadline, with no second chances before they're just thrust onward, assessed by broad-strokes quantitative metrics that can bring down horrible consequences on their heads if they don't do well on those metrics, because no one learns well under extreme stress. Extreme stress, in fact, tends to make one's mind work worse, and remember less. There's a reason we all joke about not remembering a single thing from high school!
Of course, at this point, some afficionados of fringe educational methods will butt in. What about Montessori education they'll ask – doesn't it satisfy all of the requirements I've outlined above? Yes, and if we had public schools that used Montessori that would be very nice. However, we don't. Moreover, even if we did, they'd still be centralized and state controlled. Why should real anarchists want that?
Moreover, I believe regimentation and quantitative metrics would begin to eventually creep back in, as the general voting population, whose tax money goes to funding the schools, decided they wanted a clear way to see results. When parents are individually on the hook for the costs of their children's education, qualitative metrics are fine, because the parents ostensibly have enough time to assess their children, and are also relatively close to their children and so can absorb a lot of tacit knowledge about how their children are doing; however, when an entire democratic collective is responsible for paying for all their children to be educated, no individual voter has enough time to read through the qualitative assessments for everyone's kids, so they're going to want quantitative ones.
At this point, the inevitable hysteria about "socialization" will arise. How can homeschooled children learn proper social skills, learn to interact with their peers?
Well, I certainly didn't, and I turned out just fine. :)
On a more serious note, it's very easy for homeschooling parents to just drop their kids off to attend public school clubs and/or hang out with the public school kids. My parents did it. You can also form anarchist homeschooling associations in the same way fundamentalist Christians form fundie Christian homeschooling associations, so all your kids can play together or even learn together if you want. It's really not that hard, you just need an ounce of creativity. This also solves the problem of your kids not getting to interact with people from other religions, classes, ethnic groups, queer kids, etc – hopefully, one would think, your local anarchist collective is sufficiently diverse…. right? And if it isn't, you can always fall back on public schools.