Socialization — again

KFOX14, El Paso-Las Cruces, Texas, 15 Aug 2005,  Parenting: Home-School Socialization

In this televised news story, the reporter leads in with the stereotype of the poor, little homeschooled kid.  "When Candy Scott first started to teach her children at home, friends and acquaintances sounded the alarm."  Now, in considering friends and acquaintances sounding alarms, have these people had any experience with homeschooling?  Have they homeschooled their own children, or were they homeschooled when they were children?  Where did they get their information from?  If they have no experience, are they guessing?

The report continues, "Isolation in the home or limited social opportunities are often cited by critics as a major drawback of the movement to teach kids at home."

A couple years ago I did an informal survey of mothers on an email list.  I was writing about homeschooling and wanted opinions other than my own.  My first question about socialization wasn’t how parents ensured that their children had enough social contact, but rather the reverse.  My question was, "How do you keep your social activities from taking over your life?" 

Most of my respondents gave me their version of prioritizing activities, and limiting how many activities the children participated in, but one mom said, "Now that’s the first time I’ve heard that question! Usually I hear, ‘How do you make sure your children socialize enough?’  But, this question shows that you know homeschooling!" 

Isolation isn’t the homeschooling socialization problem, wear and tear on the family automobile, is.

Still, the KFOX report continued with the obligatory education expert:  "Peter Mustich Ed.D.-Educator: ‘I absolutely believe that children who are home-schooled are shortchanged in socialization. They don’t have the opportunity to have the interaction on a regular basis and a consistent basis that a student who is in school would have.’ "  His absolute belief, with no statistical documentation, was followed by the obligatory homeschooling expert, and the report ends on this ‘he said, she said’ note.

But how are classrooms structured so that public school children have, allegedly, greater opportunities at socialization than do homeschooled children?

At the Teachers.net website, an article was posted for September 2005 about having a successful first day of school, and it echoes what I’ve heard from other teachers during social conversation:  control the classroom.  The advice from the website probably looks familiar to anyone who attended school:

– Classrooms are managed with procedures and routines.
– Your first priority when class begins is not to take the roll; it is to get the students to work.
– Script or plan the first day of school.
– The two major problems in a classroom are movement and noise.

Movement and noise, the hallmarks of socialization, are the two major problems.  Now I’m not sneering at crowd control because I’ve got experience as a lunch room monitor, and a playground monitor under my belt (the elementary school vice-principal had me pegged as an easy mark from all that hanging around the school that I did).  When you’ve got that many little bodies (and then bigger bodies) contained in a discrete area for a specific amount of time, day after day, week after week, month after month, you have to have some plan for keeping the enterprise from devolving from milling into bedlam, after a quick brush with chaos.

But does that make for an atmosphere conducive to the positive socialization that the critics of homeschooling say that homeschooled kids are missing?  During lunch is the invariable trading of Twinkies for HoHos, with Bertie feeling left out because his mom not only named him funny, but she gives him food no one else wants, an effective method of socializing?  And then when the kids get out on the playground, are they ‘socializing’ or are they burning off pent-up energy?

I’ve watched children both on playgrounds at school, and at homeschooling get-togethers.  Not surprisingly, I think that the homeschooling experience is superior.

I’ve been a subscriber to Home Education Magazine for fifteen years now and, at the beginning of my homeschooling journey, there were already homeschooled-teens, and post-homeschooled young adults featured in articles.  The prophesied results of "alarms" sounded on newscasts at the outset of the homeschooling of small children hasn’t been validated by those same homeschoolers-as-adults attracting attention on those same news programs as perpetrators of events-noticed-by-police. I would think that if their socialization resulted in warped humans, they’d have shown up on the evening news by now. [knock wood -- this is not a call to the Universe to produce such a person]

And no, one or two anomalies won’t cut it statistically.  In order for there to be a traceable negative effect to homeschooling, the numbers would have to be statistically comparable to the percentages of otherly-schooled persons who already attract police notice and populate prisons.

This entry was posted on September 3, 2005 at 9:52 am and is filed under News-Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.