[Roguish Lawyer]

Originally posted by D9
Agreed on all points. I'd like to bring up one other thing about "socialization," which is a favorite topic of those who bash home-schoolers. What do people even mean by it? I can never get a straight answer out of anyone.

Most people speak as if by that they mean that not sending a child to public school dooms the child to the life of a withdrawn, socially dysfunctional, misfit. This is baseless hyperbole.

Asked to define what they mean by socialization, most refer vaguely to qualities like the ability to compromise or function well as part of a group. But these are qualities that weren't lacking in Americans before the public school era, when many children were raised at home. Furthermore, homeschooling cannot be equated with complete isolation from peers (as its detractors usually insinuate). Most home-schooled children have plenty of friends and siblings, and I am not aware of any study that convincingly argues that public school kids have a decisive social advantage.

I think the "socialization" argument associated with public schools owes to John Dewey, the famous pragmatist and education philosopher, who saw a public school system as a way for America to engineer a society that could compete with what he was sure was going to be a great utopian engineering project in the USSR. Dewey held explicitly that choice had to be taken away from children about their futures, and that they had to be directed in a course that was best for society. If society needs carpenters, then schools train carpenters. If society needs electricians, then schools must be able to respond to this. It was the beginning on the de-emphasis of the individual in education, and the emphasis on the social value (i.e. the value that would redound to "society" from the child's education). At the time, it was argued that kids needed to learn "social" skills so they would be compliant with this social engineering scheme. The term "socialization," as it was born in that era in education, meant the indoctrination of children to dogmatically take the good of society as expressed by school administrators over their own dreams in their education. These are the "social" values that were originally supposed to emerge in public schools.

But that was during America's Red Decades, and the folly in the subjugation of the individual to the collective has been made clear in the death camps of the Nazis and Soviets. So, today, "socialization" is a term that in my opinion has no real meaning. It has disassociated itself from its Marxist roots, but is left with nothing to refer to. IMO, it is an abstraction without a connection to reality. Those who refer to it, do so not in reference to an actual deficiency in social skills that can be observed in non-public school children (be they home or private schooled), but mean it to invoke images of socially incompetent misfits. The fact is, I don't think there is any reason to give credence to such a connection. Of the home and private school kids I know, they are without exception well adjusted.

As for the kids with the neo-Nazi parents, I doubt public schools could do much for kids like that anyway.

Not trying to offend, just my 0.02.

BTW, my source on the Dewey info is Left Back, by Diane Ravitch. She is a Columbia Teacher's College professor, and author.

Marxist?

I did not express an opinion one way or the other. The point is simply that going to school with other children exposes the kid to other children and forces the child to learn how to interact with others. Not that you can't accomplish that if you are home schooling, but it is something you need to compensate for.