It’s a common occurrence lately, we’re up-town during the day running errands or eating lunch at one of our favorite restaurants, and someone will inevitably ask the Drama Queen (she’s now a feisty seven-year-old) why she isn’t in school.
“We’re home schooled,” she answers in her grown-up-matter-of-fact-slightly-saucy lilt.
And then it happens. There is a look that flits across their face and a sour mouth pose that reads like, “Oh. My. Those poor babies! How could you do that to them, do you have a bunker full of ammunition and food supply, too.”
And then, their first utterance is usually something along the lines of, “Yes, but what about their socialization?” Followed by a wailing, “How will they learn social skills?”
Tell me…who ever said that 300 other 16-year-olds are the appropriate social models for any human being, let alone another 16-year-old? Are those the people with whom you would choose for your baby to spend the majority of his time?
My experience with the education system in this country, as the mother of three children and having taught high school for the past four years, has led me to the chilling conclusion--public school is no place for children.
We have come to accept that school is where we send our kids to learn stuff. Why and how did that happen? At what point did we abdicate the responsibility for what goes into our precious little people’s heads to the experts and the elected officials? Why do we think they know better than we do what, and at what point, our kids should be learning math, or reading, about fighting, or how to protect themselves, or sex?
When people address the idea of the socialization of our children, do they mean expressly teaching the polite niceties of society: how we treat each other, how we interact or work together in groups, how we get along on the playground? Things like not wearing hats indoors, the proper way to perform an introduction, the simple ability to carry on a comfortable conversation with someone outside one’s immediate circle of trust.
What people probably don’t mean by “socialization” is the self-segregation that happens in school cafeterias where all the brown kids whose parents came from Mexico sit together at the tables in the quad and the black girls chill in the corner flirting with their “homies.” People don’t picture the Asian kids huddled in the hallway outside of the office eating their packed lunches from home, and none of us probably consider socialization as the filth that passes as “bonding” in the boy’s gym—things like urinating on each other in the showers or taping each other to chairs in the locker room.
Honestly I can’t figure out what people mean when they freak out in the name of socialization. It happened again yesterday, “But what about their social skills, Rachel?” As evidenced by all the grown-ups we’re exposed to on a daily basis who have such amazing social skills…that they picked up as public school children. How does that logic work? Maybe the critical thinking classes were as poorly constructed as the social behavior classes were.
Oh, that’s right! Public school has neither of those as formal classes. And neither one of those skills is included on a regular basis in any of the core subject classes either. But at home where we are teaching and learning with each other, in what my kids have come to call “Home Sweet HomeSchool” our core curriculum includes regular training and practice in how to behave in society, without the influences and exposure to all the unsavory social skills that my kids don’t need in their life and to which they shouldn’t be exposed.
Listen, really, I don’t have all the answers but here’s what I see—we’ve got to make some changes in the things we accept and allow, and we’ve got to re-think this whole idea of warehousing our children. Let’s start by not criticizing and judging parents who take on the responsibility to teach their own children. Who are we to question each other on how we raise our kids and to what we choose to expose them?
What kind of social skills are those and where did we learn them?
