Is Homeschooling Mainstream? 300+ Redditors Give Their Opinions

A BIG thank you goes out to the /r/SampleSize Reddit community that completed our survey.

We created a quick survey entitled "Modern Perceptions of Homeschooling" because we were interested in the contemporary internet culture's view of home education.

If you are unfamiliar with Reddit, here are some key facts you should know. Alexa ranks Reddit as the #4 most popular website in the United States, and #8 globally. SimilarWeb ranks Reddit as the #10 most trafficked (popular) website in the United States. Reddit receives over 1 billion pageviews each month.

Most of Reddit's traffic comes from the United States. People go to Reddit for news, politics, video games, funny cat videos, trending videos, and even homeschooling.

What does the average Redditor look like? Alexa shows that Reddit has an above average number of male users. And compared to the average internet user, Redditors are more likely to have received college and graduate school educations.

The complete results of the survey will be published later, but one of the survey questions stood out as particularly deserving of its own post. That question was:

Is homeschooling "mainstream?"

The answer is a decisive "no." 93.9% of Redditors said they do not think homeschooling is mainstream.

Explaining your answer

The interesting data comes from the surveyed Redditor's reasonings why. The rest of this page will cover some of the most insightful pieces of feedback.

The most common answer for why homeschooling is not mainstream:

• As far as I know, it's quite rare. It needs to be more common for me to find it mainstream.
• More people will need to homeschool.

Homeschooling IS mainstream

Not everyone answered "no." Those who said yes also gave reasons to support their answers. Here are a few:

• Its popularity has disseminated among the common train of thought in society. While it is hardly the norm, most individuals would hardly raise an eyebrow when the topic of homeschooling is broached; this is a sharp contrast to the societal landscape of a decade ago, where the reaction would be far more alien in nature.
• While not the norm, it's not the oddity it once was.
• I know lots of people that are homeschooled.
• Not only used by fearful religious parents to keep their kids from seeing any other worldviews.
• I think that in moderation, homeschooling is mainstream. I know a couple kids that homeschooled for a year or two to avoid bullying or to experience a different learning style. I homeschooled 3 classes in high school that didn't fit into my schedule well. But when someone does the entirety of their child's K-12 education through a religious homeschool curriculum like Answer's in Genesis - that's not mainstream.

What will it take for homeschooling to become mainstream?

Not everyone chose to answer this piece of the question. The best answers:

• Since there was no in-between answer to the "positive opinion" question, I'll put it here. I think homeschooling can be VERY useful in cases of children with disabilities (which was my case), people who live in very rural areas, or educated parents who live in a very poor school district but can't afford private school. I do NOT approve of parents who homeschool just for the purpose of keeping their child isolated in their religious bubble with little to no exposure to science or the real world. I don't think homeschooling will ever become mainstream again short of society collapsing. Most parents simply do not have the time or interest these days. Given that it's strongly associated with extremist religious groups now, most parents aren't going to make the time or take the effort for fear of looking like a lunatic.
• Integrate homeschoolers better into society from a younger age
• Homeschooling is also only available to families wherein at least one parent can forgo gainful employment, in order to devote time to educating children. Homeschooling will never become mainstream.
• More people realizing the failures and negative qualities of public education.
• Real actual standards, and not just people teaching their kids Bible verses and the occasional math problem.
• Collapse of public schools or more fundamental Christians.

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More survey data to come, so stay tuned!