Yep, high school socialisation is so far removed from real life socialisation it’s funny. When I look back at my public school years I laugh to think we were supposedly learning vital social skills!

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).

I had friends from other grades when I was in middle school - was part of sports teams and I trained for an entire summer with kids who were 2 years older than me. Initially they bossed me, but over time they really took me under their wing.

In the neighborhood I lived - had some friends who were 3-4 years older. Maybe my experience is unusual, but those were great times!

Yea, i'd have to agree with you.

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.

Public school socialization.

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.

If we're going with full anecdotes, all the homeschooled folks I've had to deal with have had major issues integrating with wider society. I felt a bit sorry for them, even if they weren't always the nicest or well-meaning people to actually be around. But by the time they're a bit older, I guess it's too late.

How do you know whether people you've "had to deal with" were homeschooled or not? Might that method result in selection effects?

I doubt anyone I work with or meet knows I was homeschooled unless I specifically tell them, and it’s a pretty touchy subject because of the stereotypes people like the parent commenter have. Sounds like textbook survivorship bias, since the only homeschoolers you notice are the ones who are maladjusted. I know many people who were homeschooled and the range of outcomes varies, just like it does for public or private schools.

Some public school experiences can be great. Some homeschooling experiences can be great. Likewise each can be awful. We need more data.

Agreed. I made my point badly. Data is needed, not anecdotes.

True. They had to tell me. Your points stand: they could very well have been a minor subset of the overall population. But also by the same argument, they could have been 100pct of the population. It's why I mentioned it's all anecdotal. Data is needed.

Germany banned homeschooling in 1919. The 1938 law simply standardized the start date and penalties and excluded the disabled. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulpflicht

Of course, in the US things are different when it comes to sending kids to school. Where there is the constant danger of being shot at by some psycho.

So it's better if they stay their kids at home.

I'm German and I'm glad it's forbidden, and not since 1938 but since 1919, and it has its roots not in the Nazi era but in the Prussian system and the European humanist tradition of education which emphasized that education is not just about acquisition of skills, but about civic education, teaching students not just to be pupils but to be democratic citizens and active participants in public life.

> teaching students not just to be pupils but to be democratic citizens and active participants in public life.

The subtext being that homeschooled children grow up into worse citizens than schooled children? What is the basis for that?

Depends on the motivation but I think there are some straight forward reasons. If the motivation is religious, then withdrawal is the explicit goal. The US say, has a long history of sort of apolitical, religiously secluded parallel communities that are deliberately parochial.

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.

> Another reason is that if you're not participating in common institutions you have no stake in them.

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.

From what I have been able to piece together about Germans (my wife lived there and we have had several au pairs from there), they don’t understand the situation with religion in America. In Germany, people gradually stopped participating in organized religion, but the social framework has remained largely intact. Last I checked, German public schools are still required to offer religious education under Article 7-3 of the Basic Law.[1]

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.

You (or others reason this thread) would probably be interested in the most recent Serial podcast, "The Trojan Horse Affair", which centers on the intersection of religion and public schooling in Birmingham. Religious education is apparently technically a requirement in the UK as well (though, in many places, perhaps more observed in the breach). If you're Muslim in Birmingham, your public school is probably teaches approximately as much Islam as St. Barnabas taught me Catholicism.

(It doesn't work out great for Birmingham!)

That was the Blair governments terrible idea to give public funding to all religious schools. Coming from northern Ireland where segregation in schools is pretty fundamental to the divide, I couldn't believe the stupidity in implementing this in England.

I would go back much further than Blair. The roots of that situation can be found ultimately in the British empire, which lead to the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and immigration from those countries into Britain (notably from Sylhet in the 1970s).

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.

I don't know what you're referring to here, but 51% of Wikipedians believe that religious education (of some form) is compulsory in all UK schools.

> but about civic education, teaching students not just to be pupils but to be democratic citizens and active participants in public life.

As if that happens in American public schools lol.

It does in some more than in others. Oak Park schools did about as good a job with this as any school could have.

And how did that work out for Germany?

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.

Read http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

A lot of child comments are pointing out that school kids are often terrible peers and experiences there are not great, and I have had my share of similar experiences, but.. that is part of social growth too.

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.

Have you met many people from homeschooling backgrounds?

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.

I have. My comment wasn’t a criticism of homeschooling. As I said:

> 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.

If you jump off a building you’ll learn not to do that again, but there’s easier and safer ways to learn.

I know not to jump off a building because I’ve fallen smaller distances as a child and I understand the consequences.

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 agree. I was treated pretty terribly at times.

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.

> was treated pretty terribly at times.

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.

Absolutely. I grew up with a mild disability so it might have been a little worse than average, which is why I mention it. I went through most of grade 3 with a list in in the top right of the chalk board titled “Stupid List”, and for the remainder of the year after it was written, I was the only one on there. These kinds of experiences weren’t uncommon for me.

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.

The "real world" view pretty much depends on the glasses you wear and the observation point.

In public school you get in trouble for socializing

Don’t you think having those skills are important for when you are working and also forced to be around people?

Don't worry, for most people, their workplace will feel like a prison as well.

Those people would do well to learn what the word “prison” means. Your 9 to 5 might suck, but let’s try and have some perspective…

School isn't a literal prison either if you're advocating for sticking with the literal definition of the world.

Pedagogist here-- I don't have the time to gather a huge amount of materials in regard to this but it's worth pointing out that schools actually are designed to be, "like prisons" do to socioeconomic forces that turn schools into, "learn how to job" facilities. It's a natural consequence of neoliberal capitalism. Look into Foucault's, "Discipline and Punish."

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's kind of true. This isn't going to change in the future. Neoliberalism means, "if you're not 21st century valuable you're going to be 19th century poor" and this has me troubled. The conundrum for me is how you can develop an advanced society without advanced education. It seems like technology becomes a social stratifier despite the, "advantages" that they gain the poor. This has historical precedent-- so far technological advances have done a great deal to correct social imbalances (consider working class life in the 1850s) but they have also furthered that gap between the most and least powerful in society.

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.