Whether they get bullied or not, high school is an extremely important time for kids to gain social skills and learn how to deal with people. Dealing with people is one of the most important skills you can have, period. And that often means dealing with people that are being dicks, and people who you like and are good friends. And if people are being dicks, which they inevitably will be, it's a good time for you to think about it, build your self confidence, and figure out who you are.
I understand that sheltering them from the real world is not your motivation for this opinion, but it is the reality of what will happen. Your kids will miss out on a huge period of personal growth and a large expansion of their experience dealing with other people which they will never be able to get back later.
An besides, even though bullying is unhealthy for the bullied kid, is a great experience to learn how that stops if you bash the right people, how to hack and influence society (maybe not something you want your kid to learn though).
In high school, I learned how to smoke, drink, fight, cheat and steal. I almost gave up programming as a hobby because it was weird in the eyes of my peers. I narrowly escaped a life of crime by moving to a different city as soon as I was old enough.
Man, I'm happy to be out of that shit and out of that neighborhood. And almost out of school (finishing my masters').
A kid who achieves at sports / art / theater / computers / whatever has reason to _know_ they aren't little. Kids need help to organize themselves to achieve because the links between planning, persisting, studying fundamentals, spotting and handling emotional challenges and the emotional rewards are diffuse. It's hard to build the positive associations that build habits, and that's where parents can help. (Yes, it's hard to find the line between encouraging and demanding.)
Home schooling might be a necessary response to the schooling available. But social deprivation is a downside of any home schooling program, kids must learn to deal with other people. Better to meet frictions by building the kids up, rather than avoiding the frictions in the first place.
It is not necessarily the case that being homeschooled automatically equates to a child that has been sheltered from the real world. In reality, whether or not a child has missed out due to homeschooling depends heavily on the parents that are doing the homeschooling. A parent can homeschool their child and simulate a private school by integrating classes (with groups of children) from museums, libraries, and independent instructors. A parent can also homeschool their child by putting on a DVD and walking away.
I was homeschooled from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. My parents relied on a lot of external classes to ensure that I was still able to develop the ability to interact with others. The reality for me was that I was able to have a far richer social environment as a result of my being homeschooled. By the time that I entered college, I had interacted with far more cultures and personality types than most of those around me. I went on to successfully complete my undergraduate and graduate degrees.
When I was homeschooled, I kept in contact with a small handful of friends that were also homeschooled. They all went on to do just fine in both college and in life. I realize that my experiences and those of my peers are anecdotal, but a study performed by the Discovery Institute in 2000 also provided evidence that there is no "sheltering" involved with most homeschools: http://www.discovery.org/a/3479
(Please note, I actually take issue with a few things in the Discovery Institute study, but I think that it does provide some degree of evidence that homeschooling does not automatically result in a maladjusted child.)
In my economics courses, we would sometimes take a look at the economic returns of education. I always found it strangely comical when someone would speak harshly about how homeschoolers are "sheltered" and then turn to me for moral support. It was always such a shock to everyone to hear that I had been homeschooled for my entire life. Some people even called me a liar outright. (I have always wondered what is it about homeschooling that seems to rub people the wrong way?)
I am well-spoken, outgoing, and have an easy time dealing with people. I do not say this (or anything else in this post) braggingly, but I say it to give credit to my parents for what their sacrifices were able to accomplish for me. You say that "sheltering" is the "reality" of what will happen, but how are you so sure of this?
I believe that the results of homeschooling, much like other forms of schooling, is a product of the teacher, the student, and the approach. I do not disagree that sometimes, with homeschooling, some children are not able to develop social skills. What I disagree with, strongly, is your insinuation that "sheltering is the reality of homeschool". Homeschooling a child does not automatically mean that the child will struggle socially.
I'm not saying your argument is necessarily wrong, just that you found some of the worst possible material to support it.
I never intended anyone to take the Discovery Institute paper as anything more than just a casual study of the subject (by a biased party). I certainly did not want to present it as academically rigorous on any level or as an unbiased look at the subject.
I thought that I had made this clear in my original post by using the word "study" rather than "research" or "peer-reviewed study". I really meant for it to be taken as more of a narrative account than an actual research paper. Unfortunately, it is now far too late for me to amend my original post to make this more clear.
In my defense, I typed up my post in a blaze of coffee-fueled self-righteous indignation. Mistakes tend to happen a lot when you shoot from the hip like that.
It's that kind of homeschooling that rubs people the wrong way, because it is specifically motivated by a desire to shelter rather than educate (it's also precisely the reason the Discovery Institute cares about this issue at all; they don't want kids growing up in a system that normalizes homosexuality, religious diversity, or an evidence-based worldview). Most of the bizarrely maladjusted homeschooled kids that I knew came out of these types of situations (though that's not to say that all kids coming out of religiously motivated homeschooling were socially inept).
When parents homeschool because they actually think their kids will learn more effectively, that's a much more positive situation that I have no problem with.
Learning to get on with people is important but school isn't such a good place to do that.
The social atmosphere in schools is abysmal. A combination of obedience to authority and placating bullies. It's more like being in the army, or in prison, than a modern workplace or a group of friends. At least in a group of friends you can talk freely, without needing permission or being teased.
I think one learns more subtle and useful social skills from interacting with friends (i.e. voluntary relationships, where either party is free to leave) and from interacting with colleagues.
In my case, this occurred in the years just after school.
I won't say that school doesn't teach a certain amount of valuable knowledge, but that knowledge can be obtained elsewhere, without the huge overhead of learning to share space with bullies, thugs, and people in authority who think they know what is best for you.
And I haven't mentioned the enormous cost of schooling: 12 years of your young life (instead of doing more enjoyable things that you stand to learn far more from). And for most people, stunting of individuality and destruction of creativity (which cripples the ability to learn new things later in life).
I think most people just assume that schools are good places to learn social skills because they were forced to go through it themselves, so they had to embrace it at the time. After a while, they look back with nostalgia, forgetting how much boredom and fear they had to endure.
Second, homeschoolers interact with many different kinds of people all of the time. Our kids play in community ensembles, participate in non-school sporting leagues, attend music and theater performances (during the day!), and experience the world with us in general. They have close friends their own age and younger and older.
The "home" and the "school" in homeschool is misleading. Many of us spend significant parts of our days out of the home. And to us (and I think to many other readers here) "school" is not synonymous with "learn". A school is a building or an institution. People don't learn because they are "in school", they learn because they want to (or need to, I guess).
We treat our own homeschooled kids as if they are, well, just people. My job as a parent is to provide for them (love, shelter, food, space--I'm an angel investor) and their job is to explore, learn, grow, adapt, think, do.
For us this works better without an institution involved.
School is a very weird, twisted little society where none of the work has any real point, there's no source of purpose other than pure social approval, and everybody is either the same age or an authority figure.
The strategies you use for dealing with difficult people in the real world are completely different from what you have to do in school. Same goes for how to find friends, or how to decide what to do.
That's precisely why everyone is always saying "it will get better after you get out of high school". Because the conditions in school are not at all representative of the rest of your life.
At least nominally. Plenty of teachers turn into laughing stock.
Of course it has a point: learning. Whether it is successful in that end is up for debate :)
Even in technical jobs and working for programming firms, my bosses and coworkers have included a lot more of the folks I never got along with than the folks I identified with, there are just more of them out there in the world, and I am glad I have a clue why they don't like some things and what I can do to minimize or handle the conflicts.
It's probably not for everyone - it takes a fair bit of personal motivation to still learn when it clearly isn't strictly required of you - but it isn't automatically bad.
At the age when it would have mattered, I would not have had the wisdom to make the right choice. If my parents had offered me the chance to not deal with my problems, I would have jumped at it, and been worse for that choice.
Regardless of whether your child attends a traditional school or is homeschooled, try to raise your child in a way that promotes confidence and a high self-esteem. Confidence is one of the best preventative measures at countering bullying, and it's very helpful in life. And make sure your child has avenues to make good friends. As this article shows, if that's not happening at school, encourage them to go somewhere where they'll find people with similar interests, be it a gym or club or whatever.
It's better to just watch the world burn.
Training your kids to hide from the worlds badness is a net negative in the bigger picture.
When I got a job I didn't understand that jobs are for collaboration, not just achieving things myself. Most team jobs work best if members are able and willing to sublimate their egos for the good of the group: I was busy being smart and weird. I assumed that because I was right everyone else would, of course, agree with me, and so none of my ideas ever got adopted because I didn't know how to enlist people as allies. I was still super lonely and still hadn't learn how to have casual friends (close friends I always had, one or two, mostly other homeschooled kids, but they were people who could put up with me just the way I was, which was kind of an arrogant asshole.)
I eventually sat down and compared myself to people who were less lonely than me and figured out what I could do differently. I realized that I'd rather not be an asshole than be right. I developed an understanding of when and how to ask questions, how to work and, yes, fit in with a group while still keeping myself whole. I learned how to be passionate without being overwhelming.
My kids are going to school. I will fight tooth and nail for a safe environment for them with adults who are on their side and not on the side of the bullies, but I want them to grow up knowing that if you tell your friend to fuck off they will stop being your friend because you are an asshole, not because you are weird. If you are not enjoyable to interact with people won't be your friend because friendship isn't an entitlement: it's a collaborative project. It may be that if you find a huge city you can find someone who doesn't mind being told to fuck off, or maybe even who thinks it is cool, but that doesn't mean that prioritizing your weirdness over the comfort of people around you will lead to a fulfilling social life (especially because those people are likely to tell you to fuck off too). Developing friends will probably have as much to do with how we change and grow as it does with leaving suburbia.
Besides, we have the Internet now. There is no reason kids can't both learn to be part of suburbia and experience the wide world outside of it at the same time.
See, I went to a public school and didn't learn that stuff either. Bonus, I got beat up routinely until high school.
I think this is a problem of introversion, not of homeschooling.
So I guess what I'm feeling is that school isn't just for learning stuff, it's for learning to live in a world that's full of people, most very different from you, and where knowing how to interact easily with them probably is just as important as learning any particular "school stuff". Against this background, I'm fundamentally skeptic that the concept of home schooling really would be an overall positive in someone's life.
Around high school they'd often take some classes at high schools or community colleges, but instead of being less socialized than the other kids there they were more socialized and were already used to having to interact with other kids in unstructured environments. Instead of spending time with their parents or in structured activities (home schooling) or just with kids their own age and structured activities (traditional schooling), they had the chance to learn from unstructured social interactions with everyone from infants to adults.
I think the concept of nuclear families is pretty unnatural, but so is a society stratified by age. Add to that that most teenagers aren't doing anything that matters and you get the frustrated, pointless bickering of high school. I don't think structured activities combined with opting out are a good substitute, but it is possible to provide teenagers with meaningful work, personal agency and the time and opportunity for unstructured social interactions.
The problem is that that requires giving up a lot of control over children (and the myth of "child" as vastly different than everyone else), and almost no parents I've met are willing to do so. They're happy to drive to 1001 piano lessons and organized play dates and craft projects, but not to let their kid go take off through the neighborhood on their own. They don't want their 14 year old to be forced to sit in class, but want to know where the kid is at all times and make sure there is always a trusted adult present. Kids are supposed to fear strangers, not interact with them. They need to be taught, not discover things for themselves (especially if what they discover is different than what you believe!)
There has to be a better way to keep adults from exploiting teenagers than locking teenagers away, but we haven't apparently found it yet. Everyone wants to shelter, protect and control teenagers. If we take that as a given, at least high school gives kids the advantage of numbers over adults and the chance to learn from one another on the fringes. It doesn't mean it is ideal, but I do think it is better than telling kids they don't need to interact with the world.
My experience is somewhat similar to yours, but I think that this is an issue where some people are able just naturally learn how to recognize the social cues -- and do not have trouble at any point, and those who have no that ability or have it at a very low level -- and just "do not get it" until told explicitly. It does seem to be an in-born ability - the reason I got pulled out of the pre-school was partly because I couldn't get along with anyone there and hated every moment of it. I doubt any more of that exposure would have made anything better.
I recommend people also read another commenter's reaction to home schooling (it's completely the opposite of yours): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3884067
One of the dumbest things I heard growing up was that to be silent is to agree with someone, I can't remember the exact quote, I think there are a few variations. So I'd see myself as a hero when someone would say something I'd disagree with, and I'd vociferously disagree. When I thought about why I didn't have many friends, I realized, though I saw myself as a hero following this high-minded idea about silence=consent, I was really being a rude, mean, self-righteous jerk. Then I'd go to the other extreme and agree with everything other people said, but I'd have no self-esteem or self-respect.
In the real world, it is more practical to switch the subject or say there are parts of other's opinions I can agree with, without agreeing with the whole thing. It's all about balance and nuance. I've been around many people that act like they always speak their mind, but then I've been able to observe them in difficult situations, they are far more conformist than they'd ever admit.
I was homeschooled from the 7th grade, and from what I can tell I'm better off. I was able to focus on my own educational interests--computing and science. I launched a series of small, but cashflow positive websites. I studied Japanese through a free program by GPB for two years (another two via distance learning at University of Alabama) and ultimately found my way into teaching English in Obihiro / Tokatchi for half a year before I started college. I now find myself with a bunch of really great friends and colleagues; I've lived, loved, made mistakes and wonderful experiences. And I'm pretty sure your kids will too.
I'm sorry for brevity, but my phone sucks. If you want to discuss homeschooling topics and strategies at length, feel free to email me.
Our kids go to public school, are healthily wonky in different (and wonderful) ways, and have friends who are healthily wonky in other different (and wonderful) ways. We live in a community that, among other things, had spirited discussions about bullying years ago. We live there despite a long daily commute for me because we believe that having a good environment is almost as important as being good parents.
They look to you to tell them what's good and bad. Choose carefully the lessons you give, explicit or other.
I went to a magnet school and my experience was pretty good. Sure, there were "jocks" - but their "power" is vastly diminished in a school where kids are sad if they don't get A's. As you said, it's like minded people being in the same place.
Unfortunately, not everyone has access to a school like that.
I think it's incredibly short sighted to think that bullying just stops once school ends. People just learn to deal with it through years of practice. Learning to deal with crap like this is an incredibly valuable life skill and if you don't learn it at school you're going to have to learn it later in life. Sure, kids can be a lot more cruel than adults, but delaying the inevitable solves nothing.
I went to a state school in the north of England which could be described as 'rough' at best. Like many geeks I never really fitted in and was the subject of some fairly severe bullying at times. Like most people that were bullied (and anecdotal evidence would suggest that most people were bullied at one time or another) I got through it and never looked back. As soon as I gave up trying to fit in (and even started going out of my way not to fit in) people respected me a little more for it and life got easier.
Not that I want to tell people how they they should raise their kids here. I don't even have any kids of my own. But having been a child for a number of years I feel somewhat qualified to speak on the matter.
The second half of high school we basically took the "remedial" classes at the local community college. I got almost straight A's.
I remember spending more time socializing with adults than with kids my own age, but I hardly consider that a bad thing. (Today I still do things like play with Lego, so I don't think I was warped by this.)
After some of the horror stories I've heard about public high schools, I honestly worry that I might have attempted suicide at one of those places.
To me, school is a terrible, horrible place that I would never wish upon any child, and if I had kids I would never send them to such a place.
Yes, being bullied sucks but keep in mind that your kids will have to meet other kids as well, and if they are homeschooled they are going to appear weird just because they don't go to school and thus don't behave the same in crowds as everyone else does (trust me, this gets noticed instantly). That alone is basis enough for being bullied and that will only make them retract even more to the comfort of your home - and that could arguably be even worse than being bullied (in the long run).
Any kid that gets bullied is of course a serious problem and should be dealt with as best as possible (although it is a very hard problem to solve).
Being bullied is not because you behave wrongly. You're being bullied because they others are assholes.
In the adult realm, there are still people behaving differently. And they're not getting bullied. You know why not? Because there is a state that punishes bullying among adults.
We need only one thing: punish bullying among non-adults. Currently they get a free pass. And every generation a million kids get scarred for life. No more.
I only remember my real friends.
Learning how to pick you're real friends based on loyalty, character, values and doing the right thing is critical.
I won't tell you not to home school your kids. I will ask you to make sure they have the years of social interaction skills to find those other unique lone souls who do their thing regardless.
I'll ask you to ensure they learn how to deal with all kinda of people in the real world, unless you plan door them to forever telecommute.