Schools are presented as institutions that exist to nurture children, teach them socially acceptable morals and prepare them for the future. When I look back on my schooling, I do not remember any skill I learned in school that prepared me for the big wide world. Whatever I learned came between the two covers of a textbook, and I was programmed to accept that the authority in the room i.e., the teacher, was always right, and that his/her narration or explanation was the only one. There was no room for interaction to the point where each child could express his/her own perspective on any given matter. So to share my deep rooted beliefs on why homeschooling is the only other (currently) possible option, it's necessary to first understand the differences between schooling and education. So let's start with schooling.
Schooling
The general consensus of schooling is that if a student performs well on a test, he/she is educated. When a child comes home from school after exam day, the parents ask, 'How did you do?' and not 'What was in the exam, how did you feel about it, do you think it was a fair assessment of what you have learned in the last few days/weeks, years?' In other words, parents are only interested in what the schools value; results. The child's emotions, talents and abilities are overlooked, and what is instead encouraged is to study hard, not so they can learn, but so that they can score high on tests, which will allow them to eventually get into a good college/university and finally get a good job so they can pay their dues to the system that has owned them since they were 4 or 5 years old.
Schools do not nurture children because the syllables do not promote questioning, problem solving, analysing or reasoning. In other words, studying is favoured over learning, and test results over development. If we combine all these aspects with the fact that students have to follow rigid sets of rules (without being told why), are forced to conform to something they did not choose or want in the first place, and have to serve 'time' in schools and carry books on their backs that are heavier than them, then I would say all this constitutes child abuse. But because it's the system doing it, and not the parents, it's accepted rather than challenged.
Jackson, P.W, a professor of Education and Psychology beautifully summarised what schooling is; "There is an important fact about a student's life that teachers and parents often prefer not to talk about, at least not in front of students. This is the fact that young people have to be in school, whether they want to be or not. In this regard students have some- thing in common with the members of two other of our social institutions that have involuntary attendance: prisons and mental hospitals."(see reference below).
I would like to add here, that unlike mental patients who have to stay in an institution to get proper care, and criminals who are imprisoned as a result of crimes they have willingly committed, children have not done anything wrong to be forced into schooling, not are they mentally incapable of making decisions for themselves or are harmful to society for them to be imprisoned for upto 6 hours a day and anywhere between 10-13 years of their lives. No child deserves that type of punishment, and no parent should subject their child/ren to that kind of abuse.
In Part 2, I will talk about education and how/why it's superior to schooling. If you would like to check out the introduction, click here.
Reference: Jackson, P.W. (1968) ‘The Daily Grind’ in Life in Classrooms, pp.1-37, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.