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Did you catch the video this week of a student kicking the stuffing out of an art teacher in Baltimore, Maryland while the rest of the class cheered the pounding on? Y’know, if that teacher was moi, and some F-bomb dropping Darwinian throwback came over my desk to accost me, I’d grab my handy dandy scissors and plant ‘em in the feral teen’s skullcap, Jason Voorhees style. From there I would proceed to snag the American flag from the corner of the room (if there was one) in order to stave off the rest of the flesh eating zombies ‘til...

“Every child should experience a bloody nose in the school yard. This is simply part of growing up and part of the socialization process.” This statement was made in a legal brief many years ago by an attorney representing the State of North Dakota. He was arguing that education is more than academics. Ignoring the fact that North Dakota’s homeschooled children were doing very well academically, the state took the position that children need to be “properly socialized”—and that proper socialization can only take place in a traditional school setting. The universal need for a bloody nose experience claim would...

Socialization: Homeschooling vs. Schools By Michael F. Haverluck CBNNews.com April 26, 2007 CBNNews.com - It was Theodore Roosevelt who said, "To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society." Many homeschoolers share this sentiment when it comes to public schools, believing that the moral relativism, violence, peer pressure, drugs and promiscuity found inside their gates provide an inadequate setting to properly socialize their children. Yet 92 percent of superintendents believe that home learners are emotionally unstable, deprived of proper social development and too judgmental of the world around them, according to a...

Amid the sundrenched days and salty spray of summer, thoughts of backpacks, report cards, and school buses may still be packed away in your mind, but September’s apples and school days are just around the corner. For one segment of the population, however, the balmy pre-autumn month carries a different set of images. Rather than shopping for back-to-school clothes and stocking the house with pre-packaged, lunch-friendly snacks, these families are more often leafing through curriculum catalogs and scheduling upcoming community field trips. They vary face-to-face, house-to-house, and run the gamut from PhDs to high school diplomas: we call them homeschoolers....

Socialization is no longer an “issue” for homeschoolers, according to some researchers on the long-running debate over public and independent schooling. Susan McDowell, author of "But What About Socialization? Answering the Perpetual Home Schooling Question: A Review of the Literature,” has researched 24 studies on the socialization of homeschoolers, according to Bristol Herald Courier. "It’s a non-issue today," said McDowell, who earned Ph.D. in educational leadership from Vanderbilt University. "All the research shows children are doing well." On one occasion, she was challenged by one of her publishers to find evidence that homeschoolers were socially deficient compared to their publically...

The Patels chose the homeschool route for their son Samir because of his exceptional abilities. His mother Jyoti said at the age of five or six he started trying to spell words and has always been driven to learn. “I’m not as qualified as a teacher who has done it, but elementary is basic reading, math and all that stuff,” she said. “The advantage I’ve seen is that in the elementary grades, I have been able to push him to his capabilities. At the elementary level the most you might be able to do is go one grade ahead, because...

Even though I home-school my children, I also happen to work often in public schools, presenting health information to classes and working with the schools to train peer educators. Our education team has a mix of home- and institutionally schooled youth, but the teens going into the schools are usually the home-schoolers. One of the charges often laid at the feet of home-schoolers is that we are isolated and don't know the social realities or even the "fun" we are missing. There may be some families somewhere who fit this picture, but our group is more involved in schools and...

Students are being sexually assaulted on school buses and the Montgomery County school system has not done enough for its students to protect them from other forms of bullying and abuse, local lawmakers told school officials Thursday. The County Council's demand that school officials better protect children comes on the heels of an incident in which a 12-year-old girl was groped by classmates on Valentine's Day en route to Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown. After it was reported that the girl's parents were unsatisfied with the response offered by police and schools, several parents stepped forward with tales of...

The Guerrilla Curriculum On the Corporatizing of Children by John Taylor GattoFalconers have no difficulty understanding that to carry a falcon on one’s arm in opposition to its nature you have to put a bag over it’s head; and horsemen know that a fast horse can be made to run more slowly by adding lead weights to its body; why is it so difficult to acknowledge then that some people might want to transfer these principles of mechanical intervention known to animal trainers to the scientific management of human children? That is to say, to impede their natures in interest...

The Myth of Socialization by John Loeffler, Steel on Steel Radio Program September 13, 2002 Every time I run into a public school teen it happens. "Hi, Ryan." Unintelligible grunt response. "Whatcha doing?" "Nuthin'." "Anything happenin'?" "Naw." Whereafter Ryan hurries off to pursue his active life of nothing happening with his friends and I check to see if I have acquired dengue fever without knowing it. So tell me, where is this socialization the government school crowd always promotes as a reason for not home schooling? When home schooling took on serious momentum two decades ago, educrats chanted the...

Public education in America is a mess. No amount of money or fixing is going to turn it around. Humanists, cultural Marxists, the psychologically oriented social engineers and gurus are in charge. Those who seek to deconstruct America, its values, its institutions and its history, as well as its future as a sovereign state, are running the show called American public education. The Intellectual 'Gods' of the American Educational WastelandIn order to achieve a temporary teaching certificate back in the late '80s, I experienced what nearly every teacher in the U.S. today has to learn or absorb. Included in my...

I can't believe I am writing an article about socialization, The word makes my skin crawl. As homeschoolers, we are often accosted by people who assume that since we're homeschooling, our kids won't be "socialized." The word has become such a catch phrase that it has entirely lost any meaning. The first time I heard the word, I was attending a Catholic day school as a first grader. Having been a "reader" for almost 2 years, I found the phonics and reading lessons to be incredibly boring. Luckily the girl behind me felt the same way, and when we were...