Enjoy!
In which it's not that small of a world, after all...
A while ago, I posted an excerpt from a magazine column where the author stated that she couldn't homeschool because she liked having her kids "exposed to a bigger world and other ideas." In an article on the NEA website, one teacher writes that without the social mingling in public schools, children will not be permitted to "trade ideas and thoughts with others" and thus will become "social misfits." One blogger wrote last year that "the insular bubble of homeschooling creates people who can't deal with differences." You get the idea, and for the veteran homeschooling readers, it's not a new one. Opponents of homeschooling insist that it will create narrow-minded graduates with dysfunctional attitudes about diversity .
Please take a moment and consider this list with me...
* J. is completing a two year stint working in Germany
* H. is heading to Europe for a trip this summer. She's already been to Kenya and India.
* B. will be spending time in Europe with his company, an overseas assignment he asked for specifically.
* E. has been on several trips to Africa (both for humanitarian and other purposes). She's also been to India.
* M. has taken a group of students to England for a school trip.
* B. has been to El Salvador (for humanitarian purposes) and intends to go again.
* J. has studied abroad in Europe.
* A. has been to Vietnam.
These are all friends or acquaintances of mine and all are homeschool graduates. It's anecdotal evidence, I know, and not documented in a strictly scientific fashion. It just seems like rather a strong indicator that homeschooling made these people less insular rather than more so. They seem to have no problem trading ideas with people from other cultures. There is nothing insular about leaving your country to travel, work, or live in another one.
I enjoyed this post, too. I left a comment on her blog.
ReplyDeleteI get so frustrated with the "homeschoolers aren't social" myth. Bad socialization is my main reason for wanting to avoid public school. Children only socialize with people in their age group. Only during recess, or they get in trouble. The children are all from the same neighborhood, and tend to have similar incomes and backgrounds.
I hear so many stories about homeschoolers being moved to public schools because they weren't socializing well, and failing miserably at public school. But - wasn't public school supposed to help them socialize? So why didn't their socializing skills improve? Because they were already so far behind from homeschool? Oh. So, public schools help you socialize - but only if you can keep up. Interestingly, I don't see the same issue in the other direction. Students who fail in the public schools tend to improve in the homeschool environment.
Sadly, when people see homeschoolers failing in the public school system, they say that homeschoolers can't cope with "the real world". They don't say, "the public schools require students to focus on skills that will only help in the narrow experience of public schooling, and not in realy life. Students who miss out on these skills due to delayed introduction to the system are more likely to fail in the public school system." Nevermind that these students introduced late are mainly the students who were already struggling in some way - otherwise, why change? So they accept the students who were struggling at homeschool (and may have struggled anywhere), fail them faster, and say, "Homeschools don't prepare children." And they don't acknowledge the wonderful pattern in the reverse direction.
Why do struggling public school kids moved to homeschool often suddenly start soaring, but struggling homeschool kids moved to public school often just drown faster?
Hrm . . .