Homeschool/Unschool vs. Public School

Lately, I've being giving homeschooling/unschooling a lot of thought.  I hate this battle that goes on inside of me every single day.  My biggest desire is to meet a family that maybe does a little of both but is further ahead of me.  We do some of both.  We do structured Math and Language Arts.  We only do American history and and we only do Science if interested and we learn often through experiences.  We're leaning towards interest led learning for the kids that know what they want to do.  

It would be nice if I could be super confident in our choices.  All I can do is look at my own experiences growing up in the public school system.  I absolutely loved school before 4th grade.  Kindergarten was amazing as it was mostly learning through play.  We had naptimes, a dollhouse, legos, books, toys, reading time.  It was fun and a great introduction to learning.  Only when we hit 1st grade then it got serious about reading and numbers.  What I learned in 1st grade, kids are now learning day one of Kindergarten.  There is no easy transition.  I will never forget the shock on my firstborn's face as I led him into his kindergarten classroom.  Blank, white walls and not a toy to be seen.  He looked out of place and ready to bolt.  He HATED his first day and I didn't blame him.

  

4th grade was a disaster for me as that's when the bullying started. There was so much peer pressure to be cool and if you cared too much about learning and getting ahead then you were a nerd.  If you didn't have the most expensive clothes then you were shunned and out of their circles.  Each grade on up got increasingly worse but one thing I really noticed was the older I got, the less the lessons made any real life sense.  High school was getting ridiculous to me.  Whatever happened to learning what we actually needed in life?  Every single time I ask a public school kid fresh into the summer break what they learned in History that year, they shrug their shoulders and say, "I don't know. I can't remember." 

A friend pointed out a really neat video going viral.  If you have a hard time understanding the words in the song he has them written out under the info of the song.

Don't Stay in School