home schooling

Another big item missing in my girls' academy schooling was any concept of creativity, being creative, though I admit I never took and art course due to the choices and the times for the choices. I'm really talking about lack of the concept of creativity re ideas.

No, because I was the class clown, the class rebel and the class nerd all in one package. (In practice, most of the time, I had my class nerd hat on.) Oh yeah, and I was fat, too. Given standard group dynamics among school children, that basically meant I had no social life in school. The only social life I had happened outside of school, where I was free to associate with people who cared about classical music, math and the sciences, anarchist philosophers, and other nerdy stuff I cared about.

After 13 years of school and 15 months of cumplsory military service, I finally got into college. It felt like a breath of fresh air after 14 years of prison.

By the way I do agree with not sending kindergarteners to school all day. If we hadn't had half-day kindergarten available, I may have done something about that. Sozlet was ready for a full day at school by first grade, and loved it. Half-day was right for her for kindergarten.

I am generally against how kindergarten has been made into the new first grade (and preschool has become the new kindergarten), but that's another rant.

That doesn't mean you learn these things better or faster, necessarily.

Just sayin': School is not the best solution for all. Homeschooling is not the best for all. But I don't think there's anything you learn at school that you can't learn homeschooled.

I think it's special in that it's not elective. It is a broader sample of society than anything you mentioned. People who believe different things, people who don't like sports etc.

I agree with you that educational differences can vary a lot and the location isn't the key. But I've never once seen anyone home school their kids and have them interact with the society at large regularly as well. I'm sure it exists but if the parents aim is to control the environment of the child (and in all the cases I'm familiar with or read about it's invariably been so) I don't think they'll do that great a job at social integration, even if they are one of the rare ones who also push other social activities with broad groups (parents who claim the home schooled kid has friends and that's enough of a social life don't make my cut, social life is more than about your friends) it's just not the same as having to go to school and deal with people you might not want to for more time than you are initially comfortable doing so.

True that.

^^^points^^^

The homeschoolers who I think do the best job are the ones who make sure there really are plenty of those opportunities.

But I see a lot of stuff like this (I think DrewDad and O'Bill's sis would be exempt):

There is this woman in our community who seems to be permanently aggrieved. It's always something.

She took her kids out of school to homeschool them.

Her son is in football with the son of a friend of mine. The mom I'm talking about is always browbeating the coach about something. Her son wasn't playing enough, her son was exhausted because he was playing too much, etc., etc. Then she took him out of football.

His world keeps getting smaller and smaller.

Just one anecdote. Again, I think it can be done right. But I think a lot of people do it wrong.

Well, how much time does it take to learn how to confront or avoid someone obnoxious? More time than you spend outside of school, or less?

Damn clusters.

Mmmm... Suburban (and rural) schools aren't really bastions of diversity.


Now you're presenting anecdotal evidence.



Like I said, this is changing rapidly. Of the several homeschooler's I know, only one is doing it for religious reasons.


Hmm... I'm not sure why this is a criterion for education.

I may be using "social life" less accurately than I am supposed to and I'm not talking about having friends necessarily, but facing exactly this kind of adversity in life. In school I was the kid who sounded funny when he tried to cuss, didn't have any money for food (and stole my lunch from the cafeteria every day) and wore the same thing over and over because I had nothing else to wear.

I didn't have an easy time of it at all but that was an important experience for me and not having gone through that would have left me with thinner skin and not enough experience with the negatives of social life.



I completely get the feeling. I remember swearing to "protect" my brother from school and make sure he only went to college, where people are actually there to learn and would not be in this odd prison-like society. The comparisons to prison were ones I made often, and that's what it felt like to me. I had to fight to keep from being the "bitch" and it was "survival of the fittest".

But as bad as it could be, I'd never trade it for anything in the world. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And while you may not have enjoyed it I bet it made you stronger.

True that, as well.

Talking with myself again, I'll say that I'm doubtful that creativity re ideas is a staple of all homeschooling either.

There's nothing wrong with anecdotal evidence as long as you know what it is and what it's worth. I'm not presenting it as empirical evidence, which was the issue of semantics that I took up with Bill.

My own experience (read: anecdotal evidence) goes like this:

I was home schooled very well at a young age. My mother started teaching me to read before I could walk and by two I could read a couple hundred words off of flash cards. I could read encyclopedias and newspaper articles at around 5.

So I did, I read voraciously all my life and learned a lot. At some point the home schooling became inadequate. I was an early math whiz, and my favorite toy was a calculator for a long time, I taught myself most basic arithmetic using the BEKA and Superworkbook homeschooling books with diminishing input from adults. It worked well initially, and I could beat any adult I knew at long series of calculations (even if they used calculators) and I made a bunch of interesting shortcuts to learn the math I had textbooks for. But the work books and expertise available to me was limited to the 6th grade, most adults can't teach beyond the 6th grade and the ones I knew were no exception. So by the time I was 8, I couldn't learn any more math at all and very little of anything else. Additionally my home schooling ended up being non-existent after a certain age, and I was simply put to work.

Now that's just my academic qualms with it, which are few. Even though I spent the next years without any education, when I first attended a school my academic education was not lacking at all. I remember my first day in school when a teacher remarked "Gentel! What school did you transfer from? They did a great job!". I was embarrassed to talk about my weird ass past so I just said the name of the school my dad had gone to as it was the only other school I knew.

I had no academic problems in school, some teachers just sent me to a library because I had already learned what they were teaching, others had me grade papers and assist them in teaching. But what I was wholly unprepared for was the sheer number of complete jerks there are in society.

I'd never heard anyone say "F*** you" and certainly never heard anyone say the things 7th graders say about your mom. The very first day I fought to defend my mother's honor with a couple people. I was so damn naive that I even had some sense of honor in fighting (something I had no real experience with till then) that refused to start any of the fights, and they'd have to strike me first. When I said naive I meant it and I also let them all connect first and they were all right-handed and left the left side of my chin pretty ugly. But I held my own (hey, I was terrified and was fighting for my life, they were just being bullies) every day and things started to get worse.

Then tough guys in the school and the various gang bangers started to take notice of the new spirited kid and because I refused to fight in school I had a line of fights waiting for me on the dirt road home ever day. The ice cream man even gave up trying to break them up and just started parking there to wait for the crowd to sell his ice cream.

To put it quite simply, I had a hell of a time adapting from a society that I was sheltered from. Teachers and principles didn't quite get it ("it's like you feel you have something to prove and are trying to make a name for yourself") and thought I was just having new guy in school difficulties and didn't get that I simply had no idea how to deal with jerks.

I eventually did get it (society at large) and my experience became much more positive. I didn't have to throw down at every single ugly word or challenge, I realized that there are dumb people in life and that I can't fight with them forever. I developed the ability to ignore jerks and deflect conflicts (hey, a joke would have worked a lot of the times I went for a fight, but I didn't know that yet) and that's pretty much all I took out of the education system.

I didn't learn a thing academically, I never got to the levels I'd left off as a kid so I paid no attention in class. It was a social learning environment and not an academic one. And the great deficiency in my home schooling was not academic (though I have significant gripes about that and would have loved to have pursued more advanced mathematics as a kid) but social. I did not know society at all and that was a far larger impediment to me than any academic deficiency would have been.

Of course, my own case was pretty extreme, and my social integration was less than that of even most home schooled kids but the more typical examples of home schooling I've seen similarly stunt social growth and suffer from the same types of fundamentally flawed motivation: to keep the kid away from X.

Millage may vary of course.

I get the point, Soz, really I do. I made essentially similar points when I learned the Turbo Frog was to be home schooled in the first place. I should probably note: He did choose public school from freshman year on and I suspect Sis would have chose that for him even if he hadn't (she has a knack for getting the kids to choose what she thinks is best for them). She'd also tell you that 99% of the parenting part is done pre-teen... then you get to see what you get. I'm not unbiased, of course, but I find the results simply staggering.

I'll be curious how Sozlet reacts when she realizes how very little she learns in school compared to her potential. I recall thinking it was cool at first that it was so easy... but that gave way to being bored out of my skull.

Looks as if I have another vote for my point about differences within the systems vs differences between the systems.

And thanks for understanding the feeling. People usually think I'm hyping it up when I say that.

Very interesting, thank you. (sincerely)

I know, but at the same time I'm saying maybe you just haven't met the right kind of homeshoolers.

Well, there's what Robert said early on too -- she's not ONLY learning in school. With an English major/ art minor/ education master's mom, and a scientist/math whiz dad, she's getting a fairly well-rounded supplementary education at home.

And she's recognized as gifted in school and they're letting her go at her own pace. (There are good public schools, honest.) She's learning plenty there.

But she loves to go for social aspects beyond all else, probably. She's an only child so that takes on extra importance. She has a whole lot of really rich friendships, and she just loves spending time with all these kids at school. (The whole grade has recess and lunch together, so all of the friends congregate, including the ones who are not in her class.)