"Their playmates were so selectively chosen that they were rarely allowed to interact with other kids at all. It showed. They were socially underdeveloped to a degree that, in retrospect, is legitimately sort of troubling."
"His skin was paper white, in Georgia, in August. He hadn’t been out in the sun in months. Not only did he not understand the rules of baseball, he was, at the age of about 12, physically unable to throw an object."
"Steve, in effect, was completely socially isolated."
The culture of acceptance of this kind of abuse in the US needs to change.
I'm curious - would you say the same thing if it was a kid in rural, bible-thumping Arkansas with secular, scientifically-educated parents who want him to learn about evolution without interference?
It's easy to forget that sometimes whole communities of people - sometimes millions of them - have values different from ours. And that there are people like us who are minorities in those communities. You can't protect the rights of those minorities without also protecting the rights of minorities within our communities, as strange as their beliefs may be.
Good point, I definitely agree that the rights of minorities need to be protected. Some problems with this idea are with defining what are rights and what constitutes child abuse, and what to do about abuse.
The extremes of social isolation that some of these kids endure falls on the abusive side of the line for me. I don't know what to do about that, it's a hard problem. Becoming less socially acceptable to behave that way among American adults seems like a reasonable step in the right direction.
To answer your question, I think it would also be best for the scientist parents children to interact socially with other local children in rural, bible-thumping Arkansas. If they wanted to home school their kids that is their decision to make. Humans are social animals however and a reasonable amount of real world social interaction is important.
The whole article rings true with my personal experiences, but I'd like to make it very clear that this has nothing to do with religion. Secular households are perfectly capable of making similar mistakes.
Homeschooling ensures that if your family has issues, kids will be exposed to them 24/7, without the time spent elsewhere such as school. It effectively removes all checks and balances and leaves everything up to the parents, who can easily mess up.
Particularly re: lack of socializing, I like to think of it as overoptimizing for IQ instead of EQ. It works, but as the kid you'll regret it down the road.
I've never understood the mentality that leads to homeschooling. When so many people are terrified at becoming parents/at being new parents because they've just been entrusted with a life and they're afraid to screw up, where do parents find the confidence in themselves to believe that they should be responsible for the totality of a child's exposure to other people and knowledge? At least a school experience allows for new ideas, experiences, role models, and environments.
E: Not to disrespect any parents who have decided to homeschool, of course. I was homeschooled before I was old enough to start preschool, and my brother was homeschooled for a year during, I think, middle school. It's a decision my own parents made, too, for a period.
For my parents and many of their friends the primary motivation was along this line of thinking. I'm not saying this is a totally fair or accurate line of thought but it is the line of thinking that leads one to decide to homeschool.
I can take my child's education into my own hands and probably make a few mistakes along the way but at least I care deeply about my child and have a trusting relationship with my child. Children are resilant and the real things a child should learn through K-12 has more to do with character, the ability to learn, follow-through, complete a problem, read for comprehension, etc... Things that don't require a degree or certificate to effectively teach.
Alternatively, I can trust their education to the State, to underfunded schools, to teachers (some of whom are great but some of whom are in place purely because of a broken system) who may care a little bit but have to split their care and attention between 20-80 other kids none of whom are their own, to an educational system which has long been optimized in the wrong directions and for the wrong reasons.
Personally, I don't think that public school is worthless, I just think there are plenty of benefits to homeschooling that are well worth considering. Even just removing the in-effeciencies that have to exist in a system like public school, frees up so much time and energy for self-exploration, additional time to focus on things like music and technology which are underemphasized in a school "system". Additionally, if the parents do a good job of exposing their kids to an appropriate amount of socialization it removes some of the distraction of the constant social element in a school system. AKA, it's easier to focus on learning when you aren't distracted by the bully sitting behind you or the cute girl across from you. For me, I just hung out with the bully and cute girl after I was done learning.
I do think some mix of learning with social is good but there are plenty of ways to do that, again in more ideal ratios.
As someone who was also homeschooled in Georgia (but was in the city of Atlanta), I don't really understand how most parents seem to believe that educating their children isn't their sole responsibility.
Sure, their kids' teachers are supposed to expose them to knowledge but the parents are ultimately responsible.
Perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned (other than how to teach myself) was the idea of personal responsibility.
That probably messed me up for life since now I'm fairly libertarian and also kept going to school until I got my PhD, but that's a different story.
For us it was the realization that our kids did a ridiculous amount of learning before age 4 without school, and we thought free of the distractions of school and prescribed, regimented curriculum, they could continue at that pace.
Experience with the public schools is what has made me consider homeschooling my daughter. Her first grade teacher had terrible communication skills, seemed constantly stressed, and there was a huge focus on standardized testing this year which led to lots of repetition of skills students had already mastered (this was the area's honors magnet school). My daughter was bored and eventually uncooperative. I honestly feel she could have learned more studying only an hour a day at home.
On the other hand, the kids in her class were terrific on those occasions where they were given a chance to interact, and the school also had an arts class rotation that she loved. But if next year is much like this year, it's going to be a tough call.
As someone who was home schooled in a situation similar to that of the author (extremely beneficial, highly unstructured but with very accelerated learning pace) but who had friends & acquaintances across the spectrum of those described in the article I find this article and the respond in the comments on vice pretty troubling. There are parents who will isolate and brainwash their children regardless of where they receive their education. Yes, more hours at home means more isolation but the alternative of mandating some kind of "approved" educational process is not worth sacrificing freedom in educational choices.
While this article vividly describes a sub-culture that will be troubling to those previously un-exposed to it, it also manages to throw one of the most important and effective educational revolutions of the last 20 years under the bus. This revolution is that of parents taking their children's education back into their own hands and teaching their children at home. The internet has massively enabled parents in this revolution. Freedom in educational choices is one of the most important freedoms I can imagine especially in a country where education is as broken as it is in the United States.
The truth is that many home schooled kids are a little less socially refined in their earlier years unless their parents go to great efforts (as mine did) to involve them in social activities outside the home on a regular basis. However, of all of the home schooled kids that I knew growing up even the most isolated have managed to adjust eventually and I would argue that the majority of those I knew were receiving a superior education and went into the post K-12 years with many advantages over their public schooled counter-parts.
There is a strong anti-homeschool contingent in this country with a mix of motives and arguments against and I get very bothered by articles like this because of the misinformation and in-balanced perspective they propagate. Even though the author doesn't argue against home schooling directly or as a whole, it does reinforce stereotypes and ideas that are simply not the truth in the majority of cases. Read the comments thread on vice and you will see exactly what I'm referring to.
I feel this article probably paints an unfair picture of the south to many that may read it. Having grown up in the south I can relate to some of what it talks about (crazy evangelicals) but people at the extreme end of this are very much a minority.
I was homeschooled in a conservative (although not full-on-fundamentalist) Christian household the whole way, K-12. No TV, etc... although with my family it was only partially due to Christian conservatism and almost more due to ivory tower intellectualism (an odd mix, I know... I wasn't allowed to listen to rock music, but we listened to either classical music or liberal NPR instead, not Rush Limbaugh). I've never seen an episode of Transformers. Most "Wasn't the 90s great?" memes I can't really relate to.
I learned a hell of a lot, though, because I was allowed and encouraged to.
By the time I was 12, most of my social group (a fun, tight-knit youth group at church) was not made up of homeschoolers, so I adjusted pretty well socially. In college most people were surprised if I mentioned I was homeschooled.
I definitely knew several families of downright weird kids like the ones the author described... they were generally a minority though. (I homeschooled in a relatively large metropolitan area, so that perhaps helped). The majority of homeschooled kids, at least in my area, were not obviously socially awkward, although they were almost all trained by rote to be morally conservative.
The truest line in the article is the first one: "To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid." - John Holt
I'd also add that school is a place where we learn how to treat other people like dirt. If I ever homeschooled my kids it would be because I thought it gave them a distinct chance to be a nicer, more decent human being.
By the way, since it is perhaps an underrepresented voice in this community, I don't mind saying that I am still a Christian, and if/when I have kids I hope they come to the same faith, since I believe it's the most important decision they can make in life (and after -- heyyyo).
But I wouldn't homeschool them for this reason.
Being (or in the case of kids who were raised in a Christian household, remaining) a Christian is and always has been a personal choice, and to implicitly undermine this by trying to ingrain Christianity into somebody is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.
Cherokee County schools in the late 90s are the reason we decided to home school our kids. Although we moved to VA soon after, we ran into all those same stereotypes farther North too. My family holds the rare distinction of being kicked out of the local liberal home school group for being too conservative while also being unwelcome in the conservative groups for being too liberal.
My son had a very successful first year of college last year and my daughter will be taking community college classes for this fall in what would be her senior year if she went to high school. They both had the choice to attend high school. They both passed.
18 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 37.2 ms ] thread"His skin was paper white, in Georgia, in August. He hadn’t been out in the sun in months. Not only did he not understand the rules of baseball, he was, at the age of about 12, physically unable to throw an object."
"Steve, in effect, was completely socially isolated."
The culture of acceptance of this kind of abuse in the US needs to change.
It's easy to forget that sometimes whole communities of people - sometimes millions of them - have values different from ours. And that there are people like us who are minorities in those communities. You can't protect the rights of those minorities without also protecting the rights of minorities within our communities, as strange as their beliefs may be.
The extremes of social isolation that some of these kids endure falls on the abusive side of the line for me. I don't know what to do about that, it's a hard problem. Becoming less socially acceptable to behave that way among American adults seems like a reasonable step in the right direction.
To answer your question, I think it would also be best for the scientist parents children to interact socially with other local children in rural, bible-thumping Arkansas. If they wanted to home school their kids that is their decision to make. Humans are social animals however and a reasonable amount of real world social interaction is important.
Homeschooling ensures that if your family has issues, kids will be exposed to them 24/7, without the time spent elsewhere such as school. It effectively removes all checks and balances and leaves everything up to the parents, who can easily mess up.
Particularly re: lack of socializing, I like to think of it as overoptimizing for IQ instead of EQ. It works, but as the kid you'll regret it down the road.
E: Not to disrespect any parents who have decided to homeschool, of course. I was homeschooled before I was old enough to start preschool, and my brother was homeschooled for a year during, I think, middle school. It's a decision my own parents made, too, for a period.
I can take my child's education into my own hands and probably make a few mistakes along the way but at least I care deeply about my child and have a trusting relationship with my child. Children are resilant and the real things a child should learn through K-12 has more to do with character, the ability to learn, follow-through, complete a problem, read for comprehension, etc... Things that don't require a degree or certificate to effectively teach.
Alternatively, I can trust their education to the State, to underfunded schools, to teachers (some of whom are great but some of whom are in place purely because of a broken system) who may care a little bit but have to split their care and attention between 20-80 other kids none of whom are their own, to an educational system which has long been optimized in the wrong directions and for the wrong reasons.
Personally, I don't think that public school is worthless, I just think there are plenty of benefits to homeschooling that are well worth considering. Even just removing the in-effeciencies that have to exist in a system like public school, frees up so much time and energy for self-exploration, additional time to focus on things like music and technology which are underemphasized in a school "system". Additionally, if the parents do a good job of exposing their kids to an appropriate amount of socialization it removes some of the distraction of the constant social element in a school system. AKA, it's easier to focus on learning when you aren't distracted by the bully sitting behind you or the cute girl across from you. For me, I just hung out with the bully and cute girl after I was done learning.
I do think some mix of learning with social is good but there are plenty of ways to do that, again in more ideal ratios.
Or, if you're terrifically smart, then the confidence obviously comes from that.
Or, if you're a hippy, the confidence comes from a fuck-it-all attitude.
In my experience, these are the three main groups that homeschool.
Sure, their kids' teachers are supposed to expose them to knowledge but the parents are ultimately responsible.
Perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned (other than how to teach myself) was the idea of personal responsibility.
That probably messed me up for life since now I'm fairly libertarian and also kept going to school until I got my PhD, but that's a different story.
It turned out they could, and they did.
I definitely think that for a relatively self motivated student, homeschooling works very well.
While this article vividly describes a sub-culture that will be troubling to those previously un-exposed to it, it also manages to throw one of the most important and effective educational revolutions of the last 20 years under the bus. This revolution is that of parents taking their children's education back into their own hands and teaching their children at home. The internet has massively enabled parents in this revolution. Freedom in educational choices is one of the most important freedoms I can imagine especially in a country where education is as broken as it is in the United States.
The truth is that many home schooled kids are a little less socially refined in their earlier years unless their parents go to great efforts (as mine did) to involve them in social activities outside the home on a regular basis. However, of all of the home schooled kids that I knew growing up even the most isolated have managed to adjust eventually and I would argue that the majority of those I knew were receiving a superior education and went into the post K-12 years with many advantages over their public schooled counter-parts.
There is a strong anti-homeschool contingent in this country with a mix of motives and arguments against and I get very bothered by articles like this because of the misinformation and in-balanced perspective they propagate. Even though the author doesn't argue against home schooling directly or as a whole, it does reinforce stereotypes and ideas that are simply not the truth in the majority of cases. Read the comments thread on vice and you will see exactly what I'm referring to.
I learned a hell of a lot, though, because I was allowed and encouraged to.
By the time I was 12, most of my social group (a fun, tight-knit youth group at church) was not made up of homeschoolers, so I adjusted pretty well socially. In college most people were surprised if I mentioned I was homeschooled.
I definitely knew several families of downright weird kids like the ones the author described... they were generally a minority though. (I homeschooled in a relatively large metropolitan area, so that perhaps helped). The majority of homeschooled kids, at least in my area, were not obviously socially awkward, although they were almost all trained by rote to be morally conservative.
The truest line in the article is the first one: "To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid." - John Holt
I'd also add that school is a place where we learn how to treat other people like dirt. If I ever homeschooled my kids it would be because I thought it gave them a distinct chance to be a nicer, more decent human being.
But I wouldn't homeschool them for this reason.
Being (or in the case of kids who were raised in a Christian household, remaining) a Christian is and always has been a personal choice, and to implicitly undermine this by trying to ingrain Christianity into somebody is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.
My son had a very successful first year of college last year and my daughter will be taking community college classes for this fall in what would be her senior year if she went to high school. They both had the choice to attend high school. They both passed.