Comment by dijit
Comment by dijit 4 days ago
OK I guess I’m going to go against the deluge of comments here; And give an appreciable reason instead of denigrating those who might choose this.
The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school.
I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country.
However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life. For the entirety of my young life, school was a prison. With inmates who would beat you, Emotionally abuse you, the “wardens” did not want to be there either, and did not care how the other inmates treated you… sometimes doubling down on the behaviour themselves. - The comparison is further solidified by 6-foot galvanised steel bars surrounding the complex, and that I visited an actual psychiatric prison not long after and the cafeteria, recreational grounds, rooms, etc; were identical to those of my school.
Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning, Everything that got me through school was things that my mother taught me- And as a consequence, I was always top of my class.
I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
and for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children- The ostracised, are learning to be helpless and to be victims- They are not learning to “socialise” more. If anything it is probably more harmful for those people to be exposed to more people until they’ve had time to form on their own.
I'm both glad and dismayed to hear that I'm not the only one who likens public school to prison.
I went to school in California, and I would say my school experience became prison-like between grades 4 and 11. In fairness, I can now look back at my child self and realize that I was delayed in terms of emotional maturity, which contributed to my social problems, but the kind of environment I was in was the wrong one for helping me overcome that delay. Any slight difference about myself, whether it be my body, or my clothes, or my interests, was a target of daily ridicule. The majority of teachers were entirely self serving and didn't give a damn, even when I was being victimized out in the open. Oh yeah, and my property was repeatedly stolen and my belongings destroyed in front of me.
Having gone through all that, there is no way I'm ever putting my future children in such a system.
The way I think about the socialization argument against home schooling is this: Is it better to be highly socialized but traumatized or modestly socialized by not traumatized?
I think it's more valuable for children to be socialized with a smaller number of other children while being in a safe environment. Tossing children into an ocean of other children that is poorly controlled with callous teachers, creating an unsafe environment, has a rapidly diminishing returns on socialization and a greater chance of being counterproductive.