Comment by spandrew 4 days ago
This doesn't make sense to me.
We all get better at a talent by practicing it. We make mistake. We watch others. We determine our own preferences for what we like/don't like. We learn, grow. Kids figure it out.
How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better? You wouldn't get same exposure to the buttload of social interaction and scenarios in a closed system like that.
No offense, but the idea of having adult level social skills as a child is terrifying to me. Most of the people who I've encountered who describe themselves that way also talk about the burden of from a young age totally internalizing the idea of every interaction being a performance. Every interaction is a new opportunity to try and convince adults that you are worldly and smarter than other kids. That tends to mess you up. Of course, this is purely anecdotal.
"Adult-level social skills" for children was historically normal, and it's only in the past century that children are assumed to be incapable of speaking plainly and intelligently to adults, or vice versa.
You might want to do some looking into the "invention of childhood"; what we understand as "children, teenagers, young adults, adults" is a fairly modern way to look at "stages of development". In the distant past, children participated far more comfortably and fluently in adult society than they do today, when they're sequestered away.
It is very difficult to see any representations of this in the US, where most children are in school, so I'll point to examples in fiction: fictional novels or movies where the protagonist is taken confidently through an unfamiliar city by a child who seems to know every location, has a sleeping place, weapons, a method of finding money, and a network of friends. In these works of fiction, the child is almost always a semi-homeless "urchin"; but this is mostly because modern writers can't conceive of a child that capable without also assuming that the child's parents must not be involved in their life, because modern people equate "parenting and raising children" with "making sure children only ever do child-appropriate things".
My question to you: what do you think it would look like if two loving, attentive parents tried to raise a kid with the confidence and skills of those fictional street children, but also actually fed them and gave them a place to live?
It is very likely that the answer to that question is far closer to the way that children used to behave and live than the way that children are today.
I also recommend looking at old tests and study material (pre-1900, ideally pre-1800) for young children. Children can read, figure, write, and remember at a level far superior than they're assumed to be able to today, and that goes for adult socialization as well.
You don't just stay home with your siblings. A major factor of how homeschooling works is homeschoolers have local organizations or co-ops where they do things together.
And, yes, this is just reinventing some aspects of the public school system in the private sphere. But that is because parents, rightly or wrongly, feel they have zero influence over how the public school works, so they just sideload their own version.
(I would say that the parents are right about having zero influence, as quite a lot of American public schools are so big and so bureaucratized that parents do not have a real voice without herculean effort.)
It takes more effort to homeschool than farming it out to public schools, so you're naturally selecting for involved parents. To the detriment of public schools, it should be noted.
It also skews the perspectives of homeschool parents into thinking "this is the best system, why doesn't everybody do it?" The answer is, of course, to take the good aspects of each system and make the public school system more viable again, but there are too many entrenched interests on both sides for this to be easy.
> To the detriment of public schools, it should be noted.
Yes, but what means of violence do you possess to be able to force these parents to be involved in the education of other people's children?
There's also a variety of kids' ages at these events, so the younger can learn from the older (and parents can easily intervene if this isn't going well). And you know who your kids are interacting with: you know something about the families, or at least know someone who knows them, so the odds of malign influences are much lower.
I really take issue with the position that parents have zero influence. Our children attend a "mediocre" public school in our US city. We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results. I always go into it thinking that we are whiny parents talking to an overworked staff, and the results are incredible.
For anyone who is considering homeschooling but isn't sure, there is a real middle ground: actually engage with your huge staff at the public school who are hungry for parent involvement because it seems like the parents don't care and the kids are just there for the babysitting.
Public schools work great, but you do have to remain engaged and be ready to problem solve. It's like homeschooling but you get a whole publicly funded (somewhat overworked but enthusiastic) support staff to accomplish educational goals for your child.
Yes of course schools vary but if approach ANYONE with a combative attitude they are likely to fight back, even if you're on the same side. Approach with sympathy, open communication, and the occasional set of hands in the classroom, and you can get the best for your child.
I can attest to this exact same scenario with my children and their schools. I observed both types: the parents who immediately entered the school combative towards administration (not looking to collaborate on a solution, just shouting loudly to "fix it"), and parents who spent time engaging with administration towards a description of the problem and ideas for resolving them.
That being said, there are and were definitely limits to what public schools can do. They are resource strapped, procedurally constrained, often fighting their own political bureaucratic battles within the school districts, and even within the academic departments.
We ended up leaving the public school for those reasons, and could not be happier.
My observation was: public schools have become much like enterprises, and private schools tend to be more like startups. The public school has so much inertia and tends to have "guardrails" and policies to keep even bad administrations functioning, but at the cost of exceptionalism and performance. Private schools have less of this, and more direct accountability.
You absolutely can have a private school that doesn't educate better than a public school, but I'd argue at least one of two things happen: 1) the school fails to attract student, and closes.. or 2) the school focus shifts away from education to other priorities (e.g., social status, culture, or sports), relegating academics to a secondary role.
>We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results.
It would depend on what you're asking for. It depends on the school district/state, but anything that gets close to the curriculum isn't easy or simple to change.
For example, one of my kids who went to public school had to use this program (I forget the name) for algebra that the school paid for. You used a weird toolbar to input your equations that appeared to be some monstrous Javascript nightmare. It more or less worked, but it wasn't great. To my mind it would have been simpler to teach them LaTeX or something, but whatever.
As a parent, you can't go in and say "why don't you just let them write the answers on paper like everybody else did until 9 minutes ago?" The teachers loved this program, because it did all the teacher work for them. The school administration already paid for it, plus paying for the computers for the kids to use, plus the IT overhead to keep the computers running.
That's a fundamental structural problem that no parent can surmount. "What do you mean use a screwdriver? We paid for all these hammers!"
The incentives that drive public education are often orthogonal to actually teaching the public. It's not a mystery, any trough where money collects will get snouts rooting for some of it. The parents don't have much say in how all this money must be spent because they don't have any say about the money at all, other than moving to a different district or writing off what they pay in property taxes and paying again to do something else.
I think it isn’t that unusual for homeschooling parents to form groups, you can do an art class together (otherwise hard to afford), start up some recurring social events, that sort of thing.
K-12 school is sort of a weird social situation, right? You are mandated to be there (you can’t even quit or find a new job), your manager has the right/responsibility of in loco parentis, your co-workers can’t be fired and their only punishment for goofing off is that they might get nagged a bit, and your worst peers don’t care about that at all. I don’t think it is obviously good practice of grown up social skills. You can see the maladaptive behavior that sticks around after—office gossips, bullying, that sort of thing (I mean, that sort of behavior is present everywhere, but I’m pretty sure it is enhanced by the fact that these are strategies to win in the pressure cooker).
You get better at what you practice.
If you practice unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills all day, you will get better at unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills.
> How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better?
This is a very reductionist view of homeschooling.
While some folks certainly do have this experience when homeschooled, a well-designed home schooling experience will have an abundance of social interactions with non-family members.
Sports is an obvious one, but there are also many homeschool groups that engage in learning activities together.
> We all get better at a talent by practicing it.
Exactly. Which is why kids need to practice their social skills in environments that actually reflect how real-world societies functions, rather than being sequestered in an institution with utterly distorted, artificial social structure.
Practice, with guidance is superior to practice without guidance. Homeschooling doesn't mean isolation in the average case. You get a lot of practice as a homeschooler. The primary difference is that your practice is both with other adults and children while supervised and also modeled directly to you in homeschooling by other adults while public school is primarily unsupervised and lacking in a modeled behavior to observe.
The number one thing people would comment to my parents about me was that I was so comfortable socially in adult conversations and environments. I wasn't even in high school yet. I had adult level social skills by age 12. I didn't learn how to interact with people from other kids who had no idea how to either. I learned it from my parents and practiced what I learned with both other children and also adults. I'm only anecdotal evidence but a number of studies have backed up my own experience. A few links I had on hand can be found here.
* Medlin, R. G. (2013). Homeschooling and the question of socialization revisited. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 284–297. https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socia...
* Shyers, L. E. (1992). A comparison of social adjustment between home and traditionally schooled students. Home School Researcher https://archive.org/details/comparisonofsoci00shye
* Taylor, J. W. (1986). Self-concept in home-schooling children. (Doctoral Dissertation). Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services. https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/726/