One answer besides homeschooling, if for some reason you can't manage that, is to send a child to a smaller private or parochial school.
After investigating our local public schools, I sent my kids to religious schools. The great thing about the smaller schools is that the adults really set out to affect the culture and do succeed. There's still some of the cliqueishness and a minor degree of bullying that goes on, but it's softened by a serious effort to make nerdishness 'cool' and to make sure that every kid has a group that he's comfortable in. And with more adults and fewer kids, it works.
I've got one kid who's definitely a nerd (academics, music, and theater) and one kid who is not academic enough to be a nerd but would probably be picked on in public school. He's found his niche in sports, but is not good enough to be one of the star jocks. But that's o.k., because in the small school he has a circle of friends and a teacher-coach who keeps an eye on him.
One would think that rural schools would be better, but our rural school with only a hundred kids per grade is nearly what he describes. The big city schools are, apparently, worse -- what he describes may be an understatement when applied to such metro schools.
The pathology described by the author isn't see in homeschooling. Yet,...homoschooled adults show superior “socialization” as children and as adults. They are more likely to vote, be a community volunteer, attend church, marry and stay married,...etc. ( The studies are on the HSLDA web site.)
Nearly all the socialization skills needed to survive high school must be unlearned if an adult is to have success in business, and in the home, extended family, and community. Thankfully humans are adaptable and most make the transition.
Treating children like prisoners, marching them about to the sounds of bells, segregating them by age, teaching them subjects in a lockstep manner, all contribute to the formation of cliques. In prison they are called protection gangs.
If you treat kids like prisoners you will get prison social pathology.
“Accurate to some degree, but I think he overstates his case for effect. The environment he describes may be typical of the larger public schools (my limited experience suggests this may be true) but not of all schools, everywhere.”
But I don't think that he says that all this absolutely universally true.
In describing schools, he ultimately makes this statement:
“If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there.”
Although he generalizes, his generalizations admit of exceptions.
The difficulty is that most children are actually educated in large public schools. In my own state of Maryland, around 70% - 80% of the population resides in the six or seven largest jurisdictions. Each of these jurisdictions has a large school system with tens of thousands of students. Several of these systems have more than 100,000 students. And the high schools typically number 1,500 - 3,000 students.
Most children are educated in large public schools. Thus, the author's comments apply to a high percentage of students in the United States.
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