The debate around homeschooling is always a fiery one. Some people swear by the freedom and personalized curriculum, while others worry about socialization and whether parents are actually qualified to teach. It is a massive commitment that requires patience, resources, and a pretty solid grasp of the material. But one aunt on Reddit decided to quality-check her sister’s teaching credentials before the poor kid even opened a textbook, and let’s just say the results were less “Honor Roll” and more “Summer School.”
Our narrator starts off by admitting she is already biased. She hates homeschooling and thinks it is almost impossible to do correctly. But her concern went from general skepticism to specific panic when her sister announced she and her husband planned to teach their child themselves. The OP bluntly notes that these two aren’t exactly scholars, describing them as “much more physically labor people” than academic types.
The red flag that started it all was when the sister brushed off the difficulty of education with the famous last words: “how hard could it be?” That is usually the phrase people say right before a DIY plumbing disaster, but in this case, the disaster would be a child’s future. So the OP decided it was time for a pop quiz. A surprise inspection of the faculty, if you will.
She didn’t pull out trigonometry or advanced chemistry. She didn’t ask for an analysis of The Great Gatsby. She went for the basics. The bare minimums. She asked her sister to define a verb, name the planets, and solve a simple division problem. These are things most of us learned before we were tall enough to ride the big roller coasters.
The results were, to put it mildly, a catastrophe. The sister couldn’t name the planets. When asked for a verb, she gave the definition of an adjective. And the simple division? She got it “completely wrong.” It wasn’t just a bad test day. It was a fundamental lack of the very knowledge she planned to bestow upon her child. It was, as the narrator put it, “kinda sad.”
The OP didn’t sugarcoat it. She told her the right answers and asked the million-dollar question: If you can’t do it, how are you going to teach the kid to read or do math? The sister, faced with her own academic shortcomings in real-time, didn’t take the feedback as a constructive wake-up call. She called the OP a jerk and left the room to cry.
Now the family is divided. The husband is on the OP’s a** for humiliating his wife, which is understandable from a partner’s perspective. But the mom? The grandma of the potential student? She thinks what the OP did was a “blessing.” She sees the bullet that was just dodged.
So, is she the ahole? Look, it was mean. It was humiliating to be quizzed on the spot like a 5th grader. But was it necessary? Absolutely. If you are going to be the sole source of a human being’s education, you need to know the difference between an action word and a describing word.
The OP might be a jerk, but she’s a jerk who probably just saved her niece or nephew from a lifetime of being behind. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, especially when long division and literacy are at stake. The sister’s tears will dry, but an uneducated child is a much harder problem to fix later on.