In A Cantankerous Call to Action on Moms Speak Up, Victoria ranted about an article she read that reported about how we’re so busy nowadays that we have to outsource our hobbies. I thought it was a really good rant, Victoria, and I’m wondering if I can get you to give me some ranting tips for a situation I keep finding myself in.
My kids are unschooled. Yeah, we’re some of those crazy, lazy people who let our kids play video games and eat junk food all day so they’ll grow up to be bums. Well, according to a lot of people we are. We’re also the latest topic du jour on talk shows and in newspaper articles where public school teachers and the NEA condemn us for wrecking our kids’ lives. The big problem seems to be that, as everyone knows, home-schooled kids just don’t get enough socialization.
I wrote about this back in September in I Got Rhythm while in the middle of negotiations with a family whose kids go to school. We’re acquaintances rather than friends with the family and the parents are always asking us how our kids get enough socialization without being in a room with 22 other kids who are being told to be quiet and not talk to each other with other kids all day.
The parents are among the vast crowd of people who confuse socializing and socialization. My kids, like most kids, are being socialized by the people closest to them. That would be me and Geekdaddy (hmm, maybe we shouldn’t go there), extended family and friends. They’ve learned most of what they know about how to successfully and appropriately interact with other people from family and friends and also from people they meet when we’re out and about.
Socializing, on the other hand, is what they do with family, friends, acquaintances, people we meet in the community and even with dogs, cats and frogs we encounter. During the Dark Ages, as they call it, when they went to school, they weren’t allowed to socialize except during their ten minute recess and twenty minute lunch and a lot of that socializing involved fending off bullies, trying to get something to eat and looking for hats and gloves.
As for socialization … Would you want your kid socialized by 22 same-age peers and one adult stranger? My mind goes back to the kid, in my daughter’s first grade class, who tripped her when she got off the bus every day for a week before I got the bus driver to do something about it. Yeah, great role model. Or the kid in my son’s third grade class, the one who tried to pull down the girls’ pants and threatened to rape them if they told anyone. (Didn’t I just see his name in the paper? No, I remember now, it was his picture and I believe he was holding a rectangle with numbers on it.)
Up until the last two hundred or so years, humans have managed to handle their kids’ socialization and socializing without public schools. As a matter of fact, if you think about it, socialization seemed to work better before there were schools to take over that role. Learning works better at home too, we’ve found. There’s no substitute for interest-led immersion in subjects that spark passion in kids. And there’s no way that they can learn as much or socialize as much in school.
Tell me you’re worried because my daughter doesn’t know her times tables. (She’ll learn them or get really good at using a calculator before she’s an adult.) Tell me my son’s writing and spelling are years behind his artistic ability. (Art is now and will be the focus of his life forever. Spelling and writing are coming along slowly, but he’ll get there or outsource it if he needs to.) Tell me you’re worried because your kids are quoting John Holt and want to stay home all day too. Just don’t tell me my kids aren’t socialized or socializing enough or I may be forced to rant.
