I've had this conversation of the pros and cons of homeschooling with many people over the years. It is always adults leveraging this complaint, and it is always "social skills" as the singular point of contention they bring. The most ridiculous this ever got was a stranger I met in a department store while we were both applying for a job. I was in my teens, she was in her 50s. The more she learned, the longer the conversation went, the more adamantly she asserted that a child is crippled by being 'excluded' from the 'necessary' experience of public school.
She's talking to me. The reason she's talking to me is that I have told her that I was homeschooled. The complaint she is making is that a person like me is definitely "socially crippled" and unable to interact with the real world. She is making this declaration in a conversation with me, the nearest example of what she is talking about. I don't know how blind to irony you can actually be, but I refer to this interaction as a high bar.
Of course the reason she and others like her raise this complaint is because that is the narrative they have absorbed. When I was coming up in the 80s and 90s there was a LOT of pressure to quit. Examples in media were always negative, special news reports regularly referred to "the new homeschooling fad" as something dangerous and scary, and the institutions themselves actively fought you constantly for daring to not be on the treadmill they had designed all of their policies around.
On the other hand. I have spoken to kids as well. My peers growing up and school-age kids since. Not a single time has any of them responded with dismay. They are often bewildered, that there is another way than the one they are experiencing. But they are generally, with few exceptions, envious. And I take their responses far more seriously than the old lady competing with me for a minimum wage position at the mall. There is a world-weariness brought by age, but there is one brought by first-hand recent experience, and I think the latter knows far more about how it goes down on the farm despite how young he may be.
I've had this conversation of the pros and cons of homeschooling with many people over the years. It is always adults leveraging this complaint, and it is always "social skills" as the singular point of contention they bring. The most ridiculous this ever got was a stranger I met in a department store while we were both applying for a job. I was in my teens, she was in her 50s. The more she learned, the longer the conversation went, the more adamantly she asserted that a child is crippled by being 'excluded' from the 'necessary' experience of public school.
She's talking to me. The reason she's talking to me is that I have told her that I was homeschooled. The complaint she is making is that a person like me is definitely "socially crippled" and unable to interact with the real world. She is making this declaration in a conversation with me, the nearest example of what she is talking about. I don't know how blind to irony you can actually be, but I refer to this interaction as a high bar.
Of course the reason she and others like her raise this complaint is because that is the narrative they have absorbed. When I was coming up in the 80s and 90s there was a LOT of pressure to quit. Examples in media were always negative, special news reports regularly referred to "the new homeschooling fad" as something dangerous and scary, and the institutions themselves actively fought you constantly for daring to not be on the treadmill they had designed all of their policies around.
On the other hand. I have spoken to kids as well. My peers growing up and school-age kids since. Not a single time has any of them responded with dismay. They are often bewildered, that there is another way than the one they are experiencing. But they are generally, with few exceptions, envious. And I take their responses far more seriously than the old lady competing with me for a minimum wage position at the mall. There is a world-weariness brought by age, but there is one brought by first-hand recent experience, and I think the latter knows far more about how it goes down on the farm despite how young he may be.