Comment by rbanffy 4 days ago
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you
A billion times this. School is not to train you on Math, English or Science. It's also to teach you how to cooperate, how to reach consensus, how to make decisions as a group, and so on.
These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.
>It's also to teach you how to cooperate,
Cooperation requires shared goals. I can't cooperate with someone when we're not sharing goals. Young students don't have shared goals other than "survive in this classroom for 11 months out of a calendar year". So there's no lessons in cooperation.
>how to reach consensus,
Of what use is consensus, without shared goals? Sounds more like indoctrination.
>how to make decisions as a group,
Same as above.
>These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.
These skills are actually being used to murder civilization/society, even as we speak. The current fertility rate is sub-replacement, but the children being indoctrinated in public schools are being indoctrinated to be even less fertile than that. Many will grow up to be and remain childless as adults, and as that happens, society will not replace those people who are dying of old age. Society then dies itself just decades later. Your society, such as it is, is absurdly dysfunctional. I suppose if one were to define "properly functioning" as "polite to a fault" or "as peaceful as cattle trudging down the slaughterhouse chute"...
why can't homeschooling involve the same attributes? genuine question. from what i've been seeing in modern trends, homeschooling doesn't literally mean you sit and your mother teaches you all day and then you "go home" by migrating to your bedroom. you're still in a small group with other children, all of whom likely still share characteristics where disagreements will naturally happen, and cooperation will need to occur to move forward. the way I see homeschooling is simply a parallel to the traditional public school path, but in smaller, more focused groups with a far more controlled environment. not seeing how this is inherently bad
> less controlled environments later in life when it's harder to change habits, like in uni or in the workplace.
You're right on pointing out the environments in which homeschoolers often perform poorly, but you used the wrong word. Homeschoolers are bad at more controlled environments, where you must work within the confines of bureaucratic systems run by people who didn't design them. Timesheets, changing place when the bell rings, studying only what's on the test and reproducing at the correct time, speaking differently to people based on how much authority they hold over you according to a system of record--that is difficult for people who are used to a lot of freedom in terms of how they spend their time, and how they interact with other people.
yeah i see the argument, and its an important skillset to be able to deal with chaos/bullies but this other part of me wonders whether dealing with bullying early on is healthy at all?
to be clear, i do believe that tough personalities that aren't straight up bullying can still happen inside of a group homeschooled environment.
Bullying seems to be a phenomenon almost exclusive to children. Adults don't mess with each other as much for various reasons, not least of which is that adults have more options to deal with the problem.
I think the way to handle socializing kids if you homeschool is to enroll them in extracurricular activities where they can meet all kinds of people. If the activity is a good one, you'll still probably avoid the worst types that appear in public schools, and give the kids more exposure to different kinds of people. And if it doesn't work for some reason, you can switch activities or groups more easily than you could ever switch schools.
I've tutored literally hundreds of homeschoolers at this point, mostly in the high school ages as their parents ran out of math ability. As a whole, they are far better socially adapted than the average teenager.
Sure, there is selection bias among those who get that far in math, and those who would seek out tutoring. But I had 9th graders coming to me already behaving well as adults. More often than not they were in charge of working things out with me, not their parents.
Every time one of these threads comes up I cringe, because virtually nobody here has worked with a large number of these kids. They just remember the one weird kid who stood out. If homeschoolers were to put forth the same arguments based on the one weird kid from public school, homeschooling would win by a landslide.
People say it's about socialization, but homeschoolers are out there doing it in a normal way all the time. Parent needs to go to the post office -- there is a class on that, and why. Everything can turn into a lesson and not just something taken care of by parents. They come out of this experience with far more adult level socialization and civic knowledge than the average kid, by a wide margin.
Who are kids in high school getting their social queues from? The drug dealers? The bully? The good kids in high school are typically well adjusted because of things taught to them not by their peers, but by their family and community outside of school.
Yes, homeschooling can be done poorly. But it is not inherently a poor education, and in my experience is far superior to the average experience at a public school. Some exceptions apply for those things which a large school may be able to have by aggregating sufficient students and resources toward (marching band, science classes, AP level courses).
I think kids copy what they see. If they spend disproportionate time with adults, they will often act mature for their age. That isn't always a good thing, because they do need to deal with other children eventually. Of course, this is not a universal rule, and it's hard to keep kids from getting influenced by TV and random other kids they will eventually see.
I really couldn’t learn that from my experience in american k-12. I was too stubborn, emotionally stunted, and usually ahead of my peers, so I’d isolate myself and learn what I was interested in. I taught myself to make music, install and use linux, to write c++, to develop games etc on my laptop during and outside of classes, and the only reason I was even able to do that much was the disinterest and disregard of most teachers. Maybe that environment wasn’t the right one for me, and if it wasn’t, then it makes me wonder how many other people are underserved.
Schools used to do this, but the push for risk reduction, metrics, and rules has become so great that it no longer happens. There used to be thousands of student-run organizations in schools across the country. That wasn't a euphemism like it is now-there were no teachers or other adults involved. The kids running them did have to learn to cooperate and make decisions in a responsible way, or face the natural consequences of the group falling apart and social failure.
Now, such organizations are banned. The closest analogue is a "student" council, run by an adult, that might get to choose the color of the wallpaper at prom.