The biggest usual argument against homeschooling is "homeschooled children miss out on socialization." But is it really true? Certainly, it is not evolutionarily normal for children to spend most of their time immersed in a peer group composed of people within a year of their own age. Nor is it probably healthy. Children act rather like animals when they're in groups together. Not only the immaturity of adolescence, but the cruelty of much of it, may be due to the fact that herding children into a series of age-segregated activities retards the socialization process. If peer group effects dominate parental influence, we are in effect letting large groups of children raise each other.

Some schools, including one my daughter is in, have "mentoring" programs, in which older students tutor and otherwise help out younger ones. I have no statistics on the social maturity of participants in such programs compared to non-participants, but from what I witnessed, their social maturity is markedly higher -- both among tutors and tutees. This may actually be closer to what human young had been doing for millenia -- but in today's schools is an exception, not the norm.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Key differences:

1) Teacher to Student ratios. Every report I hear has the number of students per teacher rising steadily. You can only ask these people to herd so many cats.

2) Lack of out-of-school socialization. Between the rise of the home gaming system and the increased paranoia of parents, kids aren't getting out as much as they used to within their neighborhoods and aren't forming larger social circles beyond their classes like before. The nice aspect of these non-school circles is that they're much easier to get away from when things go south, where in school, being cast out of one circle in a class can pretty much condemn a kid to social oblivion for the better part of a year.

3) Lack of anywhere to socialize beyond home. Especially in urban environments where a group of kids is seen as more of a threat than a fixture. Until you're 18-21 with enough disposable income to hang out in bars or clubs, most business owners want nothing to do with you. Somewhere along the way, society determined that safe streets were barren streets, so there really isn't much life left outside the walls. I'm half surprised leash laws on kids aren't harsher than the ones we impose on dogs.

4. An increasingly childless adult society is starting to have an impact on the societal status of kids. This is my biggest reach, but I'll stand by it. With a LOT of adults simply not wanting to deal with the headache of their own kids in society, they've got even less tolerance for everyone else's. Consider that the bulk of "safety" laws for kids have been focused less on protecting them by eliminating threats against them, than confining them for their own safety. Paranoid parents and intolerant childless adults are increasingly boxing kids into these little cinderblock and steel boxes sheltered from the world and sheltered AWAY from the world until they're old enough that the world at large sees fit to tolerate them, or at least they're old enough to theoretically fend for themselves. Hence the culture that surrounds kids becomes ever more alien to the "adult" world, and their social mores become less reflective of adults until they're hurled into the pit at 18 or so expected to know how to handle themselves like they've been at it all their lives.

I see that last one as the root cause of most of the "boomerang" kids that suddenly find themselves in their 20s and utterly clueless how to cope in the world until they've had a few years scraping bottom in dead end jobs until they learn to swim with the sharks, join the military, or get themselves through college. Isolating kids from the "adult" world in their teens locks them out of the last critical lessons needed to handle adult life that they end up learning from 18 through their mid-20s. Its culture shock.

Doodler --

Nothing you wrote disagrees with my OP. Modern school is an unnatural environment.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Shoulda been more specific, I was agreeing with you and I listed my reasons for such. I think its more than just how kids are shuffled in school that's causing issues, though.

but it's great for teaching them how to follow authority rather than thinking for themselves and it's a great cure in most cases for scientific curiosity.

To answer your question directly... YES!


(hmmm, my drama queen detector seems to have pegged)

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

Doodler, Ilya, you two have gone further towards selling me on this radical (to me) concept than any other text I've seen on the subject, with one quibble:

Once a kid is picked to be ostracized by the cliques, it's frequently for the rest of their school career, as it was in my case, and not just until the end of the year.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

Experiencing that right now, actually. I'll frequently have to do something and be unable to do it, wishing that someone had decided to teach it to me - ever. Like writing a resumé. I had no clue the first time I had to write one. After a bit of research I figured it out, but don't you think that this would have been a good skill to teach in school? It's kind of important in the real world.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

Err... it is taught in school. At least, that's where I learned it, and that was in early 80's.

OTOH, the first time I had to take a bus to college (AFTER two years of campus dorm and a stint in USAF) I wasted incredible amount of money because no one ever told me about bus transfers. Took me 2 or 3 months to figure that out.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

I'd love to see (or teach) a class along the lines of "Real World 101" for high school students and/or incoming college freshmen. Some topics would include:

1. Getting and keeping a job. (includes writing a resume, job interview skills, employee responsibility, employer expectations)

2. Managing your money (includes taxes, savings and investment, benefits and risks of credit cards)

3. Basic relationships ("Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Get over it." - includes premarital counseling, making marriage work, kids)

Other suggestions?

Been through that myself. I won't be the one to grouse in a glass house, I was a boomeranger myself.

They actually did teach resume writing in my high school, WAY too early, but they did do it. I might think that would belong more in the last year of high school rather than the first.

LOL, I recall the deciding factor in enlisting in the Navy was I didn't want to show my stepfather my last report card from the local community colledge. I partied waaay too much, was a serious mooncalf, and thought I knew all I needed to know anyway. What 18 year old doesn't? The Navy fixed two of those three problems at least.

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

Ironically, what community college I did take I did pretty well in. The fact that the money was coming out of my pocket put matters in perspective.

A serious what, now? I had never heard the word "mooncalf" before today, BigDon.

So did you fit definition 1, 2, or 3?

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Not for me.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

Sean, number three, big time.

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

Is this mainly about education, socialization, or both?

I see, with the rise of the Net and cellular communications, a different but quite effective socialization process. While some of us oldsters may grouse about kids walking around with phones hung in their ears instead of them all getting together in some field and rolling a wagonwheel around, their communications with each other seems as good as or better than what I experienced. It's different, but is it worse?

Teacher to student ratio is an adult problem, which reflects back into the feeling I have that Americans love to talk about education but don't actually think much of it. While the ideal might be a student sitting at one end of a log and a learned philosopher at the other end with nothing to do but teach (and having at his fingertips the Library of Alexandria and a synchrotron), a desire for economy of scale pushes education into the realm of a commodity first. We see that in everything from school consolidation into giant regional schools, to the reification of test metrics as ends in themselves, to the rise of people who have been trained in education instead of subjects they actually know and can impart to students. You see it in homes where you look around and see nary a book, in communities that refuse to pass school levies, and in school administrators who spend their time fiddling with class lengths and priming kids for state tests so the school looks good in the yearly stats.

As for some of the other things mentioned, you don't have to learn everything in school. How long does it take for a parent to show a child how to balance a checkbook? The important thing is to get the kid to put some money in the bank and deal with it. Tell her to write a resume' and when she brings back a piece of crap show her how it should be done.

I won't entirely disagree with Doodler's observation about changing demographics affecting all these processes, but I think it's a more minor point. Too many adults in all situations would rather sit around and grouse than doing something about it. It's more fun to complain about overpaid teachers and lousy curricula than get others together and go to the school (or the statehouse) and try to do something about it.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Public schools (K-12) are the best way to educate in the same way that WalMart is the best place to shop. Except that for the analogy to be complete, public education should be much cheaper. That little anomaly in the analogy is only undercut by the strength of the teacher's unions and lobbies.

Anyway, education turned into a mechanized mass production process that became more like a day at the factory than anything else primarily due to the urbanization of society. They crank out student-widgets who's academic achievements give only sketchy indications of where they will really end up in life.

Socialization, or how people socialize and what social habits they are taught and exercize, like any other part of life, but more so, is really loaded with class implications.

The uppers, . . . for them it is a whole different ballgame. They do not use the public schools and in general have an entirely different social and educational experience. Heck, they do not shop, eat, vacation, go to school, or do much of anything else outside their class boundaries. As a general rule they do not mix unless it is to go slumming with celebrity proles who otherwise have no class at all. (Members of this group are people like actors, athletes, legistlators, etc who have achieved some narrow aspect of fame or fortune but who really are out of place with the true uppers).

The commoners, . . . it is as good as any other social setting. It is a mix of their peers - the ignorant, the intelligent, the simple & happy proles, the uptight & pretentious middles, the mischievious, the straight-laced, those with integrity, those with no scruples, and so on and so forth. So I'd say public schools as a social incubator are as good as any other for learning the ropes, with the caveat that the strict segregation by age is a bit limiting.

The vast majority will settle nicely into their roles, for which they have learned the appropriate social skills needed to survive within the combined boundaries of their community and class. A few will go on to roles of great influence or contribution, a few will break the shackles and reject class categorization altogether, and a few will sink out of sight entirely.

don b - dispensing widom wherever the truth is not suppressed.

Oh yeah, what was the question?

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Well, since I'm the one who brought up socialization in the other thread, I guess it's up to me to defend my point.

I don't know how many of you know end products of home schooling; I've known quite a few. How well they were able to handle social situations tended to be directly proportionate to how long they'd spent in the school system. Those who had never gone to school at all until college didn't know how to deal with other people--and while I mean primarily their own age, I don't mean it exclusively--or, rather more importantly for future life, follow other people's instructions.

The home schooling kids I knew who went straight to college were probably exceptional cases, I'll admit. They had each been the youngest non-day care person on our community college campus. (At the time I met them, Steph was thirteen and Rick was fifteen; I met them in college.) They were both very bright--Steph's a doctor now, I think, though I'm horrified at the thought of her being responsible for human lives.

Two of my dearest friends were also home schooled, and while the larger problem with the one is her social anxiety disorder, which she'd have regardless, they are more or less ill-equipped to handle certain social situations.

My daughter is sort of being home schooled, but she's in a kind of home schooling consortium, which meets a few days a week. This means her education is somewhat structured and she meets with other kids. It's okay, but in this case, it doesn't matter what I think. Her education is out of my hands and in the hands of her adoptive parents, and I'm not going to tell them what to do with her.

My other problem with home schooling, beyond socialization, is that not all parents have the time or capability to teach properly. I do strongly believe it to be possible to get a worse education from home schooling than the public schools; in fact, I think it's easy.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes