I watched as my kids progressed through the public schooling system, and I – the ever-dutiful mother — often toyed with the notion of home schooling them in their formative years. That is, until I came face to face with the result.
My “Introduction” To Home School
At the time, a friend of mine was a hardcore home schooler. She had all six of her DNA-replicated nippers enrolled in her home school group, and a more frazzled mother I had never seen in all of my years on this planet. Yet, it wasn’t the mom that turned me off home schooling. In fact, it wasn’t even a single incident that made me nix the idea; it was several incidents, over several years.
It Was the “Rest” of Them
As part of my introduction into the world of home schooling, my devoted chum took me on a field trip. On this trip, I got a whiff of what kind of soup home schooling made. Suffice to say, I was far from impressed.
I’m not saying that all people who home school are socially awkward introverts, but from what I saw, the majority must be. If the mothers weren’t bad enough on their own, the cadre of nose-picking, whiny, booger flicking skirt-hangers took bad to an entirely new level of worse. I surveyed the room for some semblance of a child with actual social skills. The teenagers were unfriendly and depressed (totally normal, by the way) and the younger kids were indoctrinated into a sing-songy world of unicorns and rainbows. (Neither of these things appealed to me at the time.)
It’s All Good, Except
The more home school heroines I spoke to, and the more children I quietly interviewed, the more I realized none of these kids had the kind of backbone needed to stand up to a bully. None of them had a decent handle on normal social interaction with non-homeschooled children. However, more importantly, I realized that these youngsters weren’t getting a vastly different education from my own kids. Remind me: What was the value of home school? After this meeting, I no longer toyed with the idea, but I did keep an eye on the long-term results — out of idle curiosity.
An experiment taking several years
After my emergence, I remained friends with my home school fanatics. I followed the development of several of the young women I met through high school, when their parents set them loose upon the world. What emerged was an all-too-familiar picture.
I wasn’t home schooled, I was wrapped in a cozy cotton fleece blanket of over protection as a child. Actually, it was more like a medieval-iron-chastity-belt-level-lockdown that would have made the Spanish Inquisition look like preschool, but it wasn’t home school. My education was a step above homeschooling; a exceedingly small private, very socially backwards Seventh Day Adventist school in Reno, Nevada. Up until I was in 8th grade, I was literally the poster child for piety and adolescent perfection. Then, I was introduced to “the real world” and I liked the real world…a lot.
Like me, these home schooled and extremely isolated children went a little nuts when they got their first taste of freedom. Many of them went into a full scale, black lipstick wearing Goth revolt against their parents – something my non-homeschooled kids avoided. Three of them wound up pregnant and two more using recreational drugs before their senior year.
The girls that didn’t go into full-scale rebellion, didn’t have much luck adjusting to the social demands of high school hierarchy. These two suffered through four years of awkwardness before a couple of them ran back to home school, ultimately deciding to fore go college saying it was “too scary”.
My Two Cents
While public and private schools have their share of problems, the forced interaction with different kids from different backgrounds is an education all its own; a necessary one. Kids need that interaction and thrive when they have it.
In truth, the only situation in which I would have selected home school as a viable alternative would have been in the event that my school district had an overwhelming history of physical violence. Even then, however, I would have moved my children to a better district before isolating them to social Siberia.
As an overprotective helicopter parent, you might think that home schooling is the best thing since sliced bread and pockets on jeans, but what happens if you are wrong? What if you spend eight years home schooling, only to find out that you failed? I cannot stress enough the importance of independent non-homeschool subsidized research before signing off on a option for social lock-down.
More from this Contributor:
What to Do When Parents Have a Different Point of View?
Old School Parenting: Heros Like Hank
Why Do We Celebrate Mediocrity?