[reader5000]

Agreed, one of the ironies of school is that one of its sole conceivable benefits is socialization, which is heavily punished and restricted. I have no idea where it was agreed upon that sitting passively listening to middle-aged people lecture for six hours a day is in anyway helpful to a young person, but whatever.

[jerf]

I think the absolute biggest hurdle that homeschooling faces is that people always compare it against the Platonic ideal of schooling. You know what? I'd send my kid to the Platonic ideal of a school, no problem.

But no such thing exists.

Instead we must compare real schools to homeschooling. Yes, the same real schools that feature in the news for their sinking curriculum, over medicating, lowering standards, increasing bureaucratization, etc etc. And yes, there are good aspects to it as well, but my point is that it's not fair to pretend our schools are shining exemplars of knowledge and wisdom when we all damn well know that's not true. It's disingenuous.

I also aggressively mock the idea that school is the only place to learn socialization skills. School teaches you how to deal with other children of the exact same age in the artificial environment of a school. This is an exceptionally poor environment to learn socialization in. It is only one notch better than being totally isolated; parading this around like it's some sort of advantage only serves to highlight just how low the standards schools are held to are. Meanwhile, homeschoolers should not be totally isolated, if they are, you're just plain doing it wrong, and I rather strongly suspect that by any rational measure your average homeschooled kid is far more ready for adult life than your average school kid. And as far as I'm concerned, that's what really matters.

[notahacker]

The reverse also applies: a lot of parents won't consider homeschooling their kids because they're not remotely suited to educating their kids and unfortunately many parents that do homeschool their kids have some pretty funny ideas about education.

Being placed into a group of peers (some of whom you wouldn't voluntarily associate with) in a structured environment with people telling you what do do sounds like a pretty realistic preparation for adult life to me. Even learning to memorise and draw Annie Apple and Clever Cat some time after my parents had taught me to read illustrated a rather more important perspective; the real world doesn't always run at your own pace.

[jerf]

"The reverse also applies"

Absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt. I am happy to engage in fair discussions of the tradeoffs between real schools and real homeschooling. I'm also happy to discuss the tradeoffs between what schools can become in the next 20 years with technology vs. what homeschooling can become with technology in the next 20 years, which I believe leads pretty inexorably to a mix-and-match situation. I only regret that my children will at best pick up the tail end of that transformation since entrenched interests will be holding back schools as hard as possible over the next ten years.

I'm objecting, in both directions, to holding up an ideal on one side and a strawman on the other.

[bugsy]

It is indeed a pretty realistic preparation for mechanical factory labor from the industrial age, which is when this model of institutionalized mandatory schooling took hold. Sit down, do your work, obey authority, don't ask questions. Factories and corporations both benefit from these sorts of workers. Follow the clock. Awareness of this connection between these two is a good part of what led John Holt to write his books.

[DuncanKinney]

This socialization comment is one that my coworkers always brings up. "They're breeding serial killers" he half-jokes.

I wasn't very well socialized in school. Maybe that's why I was interested in writing this story.

[nicholasjbs]

The socialization question is an extremely common one, and it usually indicates that the person asking it thinks unschooling is somehow "school at home" or something similar. This is frustrating, since it's exactly the opposite of the truth: People unschool their children so they can be exposed to a wider range of social experiences than those provided in the narrow and artificial environment of most schools.

I think pg's essay on why nerds are unpopular has some good insight into much of the "socialization" that goes on in school: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

[tomjen3]

Thats kind of funny, until you realize he is actually right.

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris would not have been serial killers if they had not be so mercilessly bullied in school.

Granted most people don't end up as serial killers, but they do end up pretty ruffled and with psychic scars for the rest of their life.

The irony is that if geeks actually did kill more people they would have women falling all over them in prison.

[tokenadult]

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris would not have been serial killers if they had not be so mercilessly bullied in school.

Causation for that has not been rigorously demonstrated. But, agreed, the school social environment they were in is described by press reports as having been toxic even before they brought their weapons to the school.

[philwelch]

Technically they weren't serial killers at all--their killings were not really in series so much as all at once. They were "parallel killers".

[kchodorow]

Describing school as "sitting passively" is a huge generalization. If you have a half-decent school system (which you might not, I was lucky and had a great one) it should be very interactive.

School's benefit, I think, is that it exposes you to a ton of topics that aren't your primary interests (or your parents' primary interests). How many people have taken a class because it had a cool name or their friend was taking it or they needed the credit and it turned out they loved the subject?