Posted on 05/06/2015 6:07:30 PM PDT by OK Sun
Every home schooling parent has been asked the S-Question: “What about socialization?” The implications (real or imagined) of the question are less than flattering:
I would like to put the S-Question to rest by summarizing research I conducted along with my colleagues. We surveyed 223 families (asking questions of one teen and one parent), 95 of whom were schooling at home. The results point to three important observations: home schooling teens socialize more than other teens, they socialize differently than other teens, but both of these observations miss the point. Socialization is not a home schooling issue; it is a religious phenomenon.
First, home schooling teens socialize more than other teens. Using a standard measurement scale of 21 questions, we measured the extent to which the teens spend time interacting with their family, their friends, and other significant adults. Home school teens indicated significantly more social interaction than other teens. The S-Question assumes that home schooling teens are not engaged in social interaction. This is contrary to what is actually occurring. . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at visionandvalues.org ...
My son has a friend who spends a lot of time at our house who is home schooled. It’s not a religious thing with his family it’s because the schools are terrible and they don’t teach you anything. This kid is smart and is well read. I recently loaned him 1984.
But seriously, socialization is better for home school kids. Public school kids spend all day with the same group of other kids, all about the same age, learning little about how to interact well with others. Homeschoolers are often in co-ops with some group classes. Often these classes include a wider age range. I've seen foreign language classes that have a 3 to 5 year age range in the same class or a music/band class the includes all the way from k to 12. The younger kids look up to the older kids and try to act more mature. The older kids curb their antics in front of the younger ones because they know the younger ones are watching them. I've seen seniors in band mentoring grade schoolers just beginning to play the same instrument they have played for years. It is amazing how well balanced, polite and respectful all the homeschoolers I've ever met are.
Ping.
Wow, great article! Thanks for posting!
We have a book, “Hold on to Your Kids”, which is neither pro-homeschooling nor religious. The authors state that it is only in the past 50-60 years that kids have been oriented toward each other rather than the adults in their lives and the consequences are dangerous. It is like the blind leading the blind, but rather than be scared and cautious kids are extremely confident. A huge social experiment the likes of which the world has never seen until now.
Amazingly, this recent phenomenon has become the norm and those who deviate from it (even to “old” ways) are seen as bizarre and possibly harmful to their kids.
We’ve received our share of the S-Question, even my mom has heard about it regarding her grandkids. The most amazing statement she heard is that, “kids need to be in the real world of the classroom”. Yes, that real world in which kids sit day after day in the same desk, next to the same classmates who are all their same age, in the same classroom, in the same building.
Hm, better weird
than indoctrinated.
I had a number of students (probably about 2 dozen) over the years that were home schooled.
I found my home schooled guys to be more mature, more engaged with what was going on and more self confident, than most of my public and parochial school kids.
I've had enough experience with kids, especially home schooled kids, that if I had my own kids, home schooling would be BY FAR my preference.
Of course "professor" Adam Swift would have an issue with me and others like me.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3287083/posts
I don't care how "educated" or "qualified" a teacher is. The teacher is governed by a schedule. A schedule to get the bulk of the class to a certain point. Meanwhile numerous kids get left behind.
Parents on the other hand, have a vested interest in their childs success. They can spend the same amount of time presenting material as a teacher, but spend ENOUGH time making sure the child understands. Something the teacher doesn't have.
All children will be socialized unless they are locked in a room 24-7 until adulthood. The real question is HOW.
Will they be socialized on their own terms (they decide with whom and doing what) or the parents decide?
Today with most government schooled kids it is the kids that decide.
I would say that this is the worst possible choice for the socialization of children. They have little experience in life and could make the worst possible choice in their choice of friends.
Our slums are the real world laboratory for this method of socialization. Kids on the streets making their own choices of who they will socialize with.
Too often it is that they make the worst choices.
Attributes demonstrably absent from liberal Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Atheists, and the like.
I’ve heard the same thing from a number of other youth pastors. They all say that they can tell right away which kids are homeschooled, and they mean that in the most positive way.
This is true. They are. What's the point of denying it?
Home schooled children tend to have adults as role models. Children’s task is to become adults. Public school children have older children as role models. Increasing numbers of then never “grow up.” We have all met such. They usually become liberals and worse.
This subject has been on my mind a lot lately so when I saw the thread I wrote a reply before reading the article or the comments here, and as a result, it may be too repetitive of what’s already been said, but with apologies I’d still like to post it.
The more I see life through a Christian perspective, the less “normal” and good the dominant school setting seems to me, as this article argues. It’s hard to imagine how an institution could be more contrary to the Christian faith and serve secular humanism more. The school setting of children living most of their childhood in a group of their peers is not at all the “good” which secular humanists have deceived people into thinking it is.
Before modern times, how many children spent most of their time away from their parents or families to be educated by strangers amid a large group of other children?
Gradually, those doing the educating (the state and “educators”) have come to see the children as “theirs,” with far more of a right to teach them what is “good in their eyes” than parents have, and to impose communal values on them. Educators are practically given carte blanche freedom to reproduce themselves in other people’s children, without respect to the people actually paying for their services, the parents of the children. That has come to mean enforced secularism as only non-Christian individual rights and values are increasingly protected.
On the socialization side, liberals love the school setting for weakening children’s family ties and essentially “socializing” them in a prison, where they learn that the most brutal are in charge in social interactions, as was said here as well.
Despite the sudden interest in bullying by educators (which really has been a ploy to promote adult sexual immorality), it is hard to believe that it doesn’t go on as it always has in such settings. It is the general atmosphere, one of crude, cynical brutality. Conduct that would get adults fired from their jobs goes on more and more in increasingly lower grades. Even though adults on the receiving end of such conduct by peers have been considered the victims of aggression for decades, the similar victimization of children has been dismissed as “harmless teasing,” despite children feeling at least as much threat to themselves and anxiety, and having far less maturity to deal with such attacks, and the damage also extends to those who merely observe or go along with a brute leader. Very often all children are also bullied into accepting beliefs and even acting against their parents’ values (which liberalism promotes and celebrates as children merely “growing up” and “asserting their independence”). The crude, brute, punishing atmosphere serves to make individuals as subservient to the group as can possibly be.
You would think this aspect of group education would have really troubled liberals for decades at the least, but actually it has been very useful to the indoctrinating of children into their viewpoints and their places as followers of the brute crowd. Just like those most ruthless and brutal run prison life and gangs, they enjoy a lot of dominance in the school setting. Knowing how animal-like the school setting is in many ways, people are hardly surprised by things like the elementary students being caught trying to poison their teacher.
The same goes for those with the most permissive, liberal, and morally rebellious families. The lowest morality, including sexual morality, tends to hold tremendous sway over the group. Children have been thrown to the lions, essentially, by their parents, put into what is very much like a daytime orphanage and part-time institutionalization, and the other children of the orphanage pack, especially its dominant child “leaders,” end up having far more authority over them in many ways than their families do.
Of course, children do grow up and are paroled from the prison (if they don’t become a victim to the prison’s culture, that is, which includes things like rampant drug use), but a lot of what they experience is permanent. They typically see things through what they’ve been taught by the liberal educators and through the dog-eats-dog social environment, where they’ve learned that it’s a punishing experience to go against their peers, so it’s best to “go along to get along,” and the group is “wisest” anyway. The pack culture continues to hold a great amount of sway with people personally and in the workplace long beyond the finish of school, as it’s meant to.
Just with all this, and not even considering things like the influence of today’s entertainment, it’s not hard to see why society has been turning away from Christianity and embracing the brute culture of secular humanism. And even if other forms of schooling were to widely catch on and threaten the current school setting, especially if they came with less of the prison institution culture, secular humanists would fight them tooth and nail.
Excellent post.
A neighbor who is a public school teacher and who is a personal trainer for some of the town’s home schoolers says the same thing — that they are very well educated and worldly.
I used to launch into a list of things my son did or had achieved and end with, “seriously if he were any more socialized, he would never have time for school.”
I was told by a museum docent that they can usually tell the homescooled students in a tour group, because they listen with interest, ask intelligent questions, and are well mannered and polite.
My son played sports in town and had lots of kids who wanted to play with him.
He’s one of the most well rounded and grounded men I know. He’s secure within himself. I use him as a sounding board sometimes. He loves family and is loyal to his many friends. He graduated from college without debt...because he understood money and debt from homeschool.
He’s successful in work and is starting his own business on the side. It will be successful. From homeschool, he helped me with my business(es) so he knows how all that works.
Screw socialists and their “socialization”.
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