I went to public school and would argue it's a terrible place to be socialized. You are socialized by kids your age in an environment that's more akin to prison than the real world.
What other part of life do you interact with only people who were born in the same year as you were (and, in the case of some schools, only your sex)?
Homeschooled children (in my experience) learn to make friends with kids a lot older and younger than they are. They also learn to look after and teach younger ones, and learn from older ones.
I went to public school myself, my wife was homeschooled (for all but two high school years), and we homeschool our five kids. There’s pretty much no reason I’d consider sending them to school, unless they want to in their high school years (so far our oldest doesn’t).
In the neighborhood I lived - had some friends who were 3-4 years older. Maybe my experience is unusual, but those were great times!
What i learned in school was how awful people can be. The extremes where we humiliate and torment others. The mindless churn to be in a clique and simply fly under the radar.
Slight tangent, but: In my view a parents jobs is to let children fail with a safety net. To be there and help them recover after failures are experienced together, to grow from them.
Public School, in my view, does none of this. It attempts to educate, sure, but not in socialization. Likewise parents, even the well executing ones (by my definition) cannot share the experiences. Parents can only see the aftermath and try to mend some wounds.. but the growth is up to the child, in isolation.
I don't know the better solution. I don't have the answer. All i know is that in the context of how i judge parenting, school fails entirely on. School is lord of the flies. Many prosper. Many drown. Many could grow, if only a guiding hand existed.
Clearly i'm a pessimist here. I'm also not having children, which may not surprise you. Hah.
Humiliated by teachers.
Bullied by some people.
Small circle of friends.
Adults as the enemy.
All the homeschooled kids I've met seem pleasant, polite, comfortable around other kids and around adults. Of course this is Northern California so elsewhere the story may be different.
Oh, and homeschooling is forbidden in Germany, under a 1938 law.
1938. Get it? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, elbow in the ribs.
Just to see who doesn't like homeschooling.
So it's better if they stay their kids at home.
The subtext being that homeschooled children grow up into worse citizens than schooled children? What is the basis for that?
Another reason is that if you're not participating in common institutions you have no stake in them. If everyone goes to the same schools (in Germany the idea of the Volksschule), everyone has to participate in civic discourse about what to teach, how to fund education, and how to maintain equal standards. There is a common fabric and shared reality because everyone shares the same space.
That's obviously not to say that literally every homeschooled person is disinterested in public life, or vice versa but I think it's hard to see many other motivations for homeschooling other than to withdraw for one reason or another.
What's wrong with disassociation as a motivation? In a borderless world I don't see a reason for forced participation in a place that one might not even like. So long as everyone pay their financial debts, how they live their life shouldn't be anyone's business.
In the US, secularists have made a concerted effort to scrub every trace of religion out of public life and impose French-style secularism on a country that’s as religious as Poland. And they did that not in the 21st century, but in the 1960s and 1970s, when both Germany and the United States were vastly more religious.
Folks who want to homeschool their kids for religious reasons aren’t the nuts that American media makes them out to be. They’re people who in Germany or Sweden or the Netherlands or many other places would be able to avail themselves of public options that those countries include in the mainstream.
[1] Germany appears much more content to let social mores evolve organically rather than tearing up the social fabric by rushing change. Germany is a much more liberal country than America, but the laws are much more conservative in many ways. A subset of Americans are besides themselves because the Supreme Court overturned a case recognizing a right to abortion until viability (22 weeks). Meanwhile, Schwangerschaftsabbruch I (deeming abortion to be a violation of the Basic Law’s right to life) is still the law in Germany, and decriminalized abortion is permissible only to 12 weeks. Nobody called Angela Merkel a fascist for voting against same sex marriage. Bavaria requires crosses in public buildings and hasn’t been kicked out of the country. Etc.
(It doesn't work out great for Birmingham!)
Crucially, South Asian people are endogamous, meaning that they generally prefer to marry within their communities and moreover within the family: cousin marriage is common. So there has been consistent secondary immigration from the subcontinent as South Asians marry spouses from their communities from their countries of origin and bring them to the UK.
The average Bangladeshi or Pakistani citizen's religious views are about as welcome in Britain as the average Briton's secular views would be welcome in Bangladesh. Which is to say that they are disjoint and cannot be reconciled much at all.
As if that happens in American public schools lol.
More seriously the Prussian system was created after the Napoleonic Wars to ensure that Prussia had a large reasonably well educated population suitable for warfare and for industry.
That system was enforced in the USA later in the 19th Century.
Making social mistakes, learning the consequences of those mistakes, and experiencing hurt when others make mistakes in interacting with you are all important life lessons.
Part of the reason “the real world” after school is so much better is because those people have already made mistakes and learned their lessons earlier in life. Of course, school isn’t the only way to learn these lessons, and many well adjusted homeschooled kids are those who are exposed to social situations in other ways.
There are many social situations that would never happen in the home, and kids have to learn about them somehow. i.e developing new relationships, dealing with unexpected conflict, meeting someone new, romance, etc.
I live in a community full of them. Social interaction has not been a problem for them. As adults they're some of the most well adjusted I know. As teens some of the happiest I've ever met.
Academically they vary but I'd say it works better than school for most.
> many well adjusted homeschooled kids are those who are exposed to social situations in other ways.
I was criticizing the idea the school is a bad place to learn socialization.
You would be negligent to let a child experience their first steps on the roof of a building.
A couple of hurt feelings in elementary school is likewise a low risk introduction to the world of social interaction.
I don’t think we should strive to socialize kids in school. The ones who do okay could probably still do better.
Here in North America it seems like our communities are too fragmented and fractured to facilitate socializing without something like schools, though. No idea how to address and resolve this issue, but I’m not convinced our teachers and the socializing model are anything like ideal for kids.
Not bashing teachers here either. I think they’re often doing their best but are working in the confines of a non-ideal system with limited resources.
I was very keen to get my kids into a private school which had an education model and teachers I was impressed by, but it’s incredibly hard to get in. My kids are eligible to enter, but there’s no space for years. No idea what to do. I’m happy to spend a lot to address this, but even private tutors don’t seem like a viable option here.
I’m just venting at this point. This is a hard problem. My kids are getting a bad education here in Canada and it’s upsetting. I try to do what I can to get them ahead, but I’m a nerd, not a teacher.
Most people were. But unfortunately you will get treated pretty terribly throughout your life.
And so you need to develop those social skills at some point.
My sister is a year older and more evidently disabled, and we were obvious targets for the kids we grew up with.
You’re right though. I lived through it fine, I’ve done okay, and the experience informed me about life and people in truly useful ways that I’ve come to value.
Ideally I’d like my kids to avoid the worst of what I experienced, but I don’t want to shelter them by any means. I think there are some forms of prolonged cruelty from peers that risks being very destructive, in particular.
http://www.we-aggregate.org/piece/schools-and-prisons https://sputniksteve.wordpress.com/2017/05/07/schools-prison...
(Excuse the relatively, "non-scholar" links; I'll dig into the literature at a further date. It's worth exploring.)
It seems that human culture closely follows power laws; it might be possible that, "elites" are a natural consequence of human existence. The question is how this will be managed in a world where elites have near absolute technical powers. It's worth thinking about I thinking about.