Social Effects of Homeschooling

Education: Homeschooling & Unschooling

Seth Cochran May 3, 2014 at 2:10 pm

Two years ago, my twelve-year-old brother got cancer. He was in public school, sixth grade. He’s fourteen now and perfectly healthy but he missed a lot of class in the mean time. My parents fought the school, teachers and administrators alike, attempting to get my brother educated during his illness.

That bad experience with the public school system led my parents to homeschool my brother for the past year. He works only three days a week, yet learns more than his public school peers. He still has one elective for which he attends public school, and he’s told us that, although he takes regular math classes, he’s conversant with his peers who take honors and advanced placement classes.

The most obvious and striking difference was the change in his personality. When he attended public school he talked and acted like his peers. He used their slang, dressed like they dressed, and had the same opinions and attitudes. Since he’s been homeschooled he’s undergone the transformation into an individual. Even though he still interacts with his peers daily, he talks differently and chooses his own styles. He’s naturally individualistic but his time away from his peers allowed him to recognize what parts of him were influenced socially and become his own person.

Ideally, the educational system would produce unique, thoughtful individuals but too often it produces cookie-cutter drones, spouting the same dull ideas. I’ve been fortunate to witness a young person escape that fate.

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Jason L. Hughey May 3, 2014 at 3:00 pm

Thanks for sharing this. I was homeschooled K-12 and I wouldn’t trade my experience in for anything. Homeschooling often gets a bad rap for “lack of socialization,” but I find those examples to be rare and extreme–a lot of the accusation is grounded in conjecture or straw mans. The majority of people I know who grew up as homeschooled students are great people.

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Jason L. Hughey May 3, 2014 at 3:00 pm

Edit: deleted double comment.

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Cathy Cuthbert May 9, 2014 at 3:45 pm

Seth, Can you comment on any changes in your relationship with your brother since he escaped prison, ie gov’t school?

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Catou (Cathy) Schouten May 11, 2014 at 4:08 pm

I home-schooled my 3 kids who are now 19 and 17 (twins). Many people comment on how easily they relate to people of all ages and genders. No biases and especially, loads of experience with people and real life. They are good people with solid self-worth and that is the most important lesson, in my mind.

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Jeffrey Tucker May 11, 2014 at 4:39 pm

That’s an amazing story. It’s striking that the rap against homeschool concerns the supposed absence of socialization. Actually, it seems that this might be its main advantage. It doesn’t work for everyone, btw; some kids just can’t handle the homeschool thing past a certain age. But rather than public school, parents should actually consider sending the kid directly to college. It goes against the plan but whatever. Well schooled kids should be able to handle most college courses by the age of 14. It’s the years between 14-18 that things tend to really go wrong in any case.

Colleges will accept anyone with good ACT/SAT. No problem. Just print out a high school diploma online and you are done.

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  Kathy Grable May 29, 2014 at 5:50 pm
  
  All true. Define the term “socialization”. Homeschooled kids are “socialized ” to the real world and real people. Government skooled kids are age segregated and processed. Not worth getting to go to prom to be “deflowered”.
  
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David Montgomery May 12, 2014 at 9:35 am

Or rather than college, an apprenticeship in a market based skill.

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Jackitalism May 12, 2014 at 6:53 pm

My brother and I were self educated (unschooled, as it has been coined.)
We were socialized with adults mostly, but we were also sent to summer camp a few times. I will admit it was difficult to relate to the other kids but I think it was because my brother and I had different interests.
We are both well socialized and were constantly complimented for being “well behaved, intelligent children” while growing up.

Little did they know!

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John R. Meese May 13, 2014 at 3:56 pm

I was homeschooled K-12 and wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ll admit, I did have trouble relating to some of my public-schooled peers, and that led to some self-esteem issues as a young teen, but once I got past that I embraced my freedom.

On top of a full load of classes, I was still able to work 40 hours/week at our local Chick-fil-a, which led to incredible leadership opportunities (I was training managers at 17) and my senior year in High School I dual-enrolled at a community college nearby, effectively cutting out a year’s worth of college courses before I graduated High School.

I’m not sure I ever want to fit the society “norms” of today, so I’m fine being a bit different. Now, it’s never a stumbling block—only a boost in any field I pursue. Also, I learned the skill of independent learning in my homeshooled years, so I can still teach myself most subjects on my own!

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Seth Cochran May 13, 2014 at 5:49 pm

Seth, Can you comment on any changes in your relationship with your brother since he escaped prison, ie gov’t school?

Our relationship changed a lot during that time so I’m not sure I can attribute any one of them to his escape from public schooling. Being fourteen years old, his attributes are all changing rapidly. As opposed to having those attributes shaped by the school system (and the larger political system it serves), he has the freedom to shape himself as he sees fit- limited only by the laws of physics and his own sound judgment.

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David D Friedman May 27, 2014 at 9:28 pm

My wife and I unschooled, largely home unschooled (we started with a small private school modeled on Sudbury Valley, and when problems developed with that switched to home), our two kids. When our daughter went to Oberlin, she was in what was for her an alien culture, ended up with no friends her age but getting along well with adults. That was somewhat less true of our son at U of Chicago, in part because his interests in gaming connected him to other kids there with similar interests.

There’s an interesting book by Judith Harris, The Nurture Assumption. She argues that the family environment has little effect on the adult personality in most cases, because humans are good at realizing that different environments have different rules. The child thus has one personality with his parents at home, another with his peer group at school, and it is the latter that mostly forms the adult personality.

She mentions an uncommon special case–where the family is the peer group. If you are thinking about other people home schooling and believe their home culture is inferior to the mass culture—how a lot of people look at it, on the assumption that home schooling is done by religious fundamentalists to protect their children from learning about evolution—that’s an argument against. If you are thinking about home schooling your own children, on the other hand, and believe that your family culture is better than the mass culture of your society, it’s an argument for. Certainly we are happy with how our children turned out.

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  B.K. Marcus May 28, 2014 at 9:46 am
  
  My wife and I decided to homeschool long before we had our son, long before we were married, actually. It was part of a several-year-long conversation in which she started out with skepticism toward homeschooling and ended up with much more skepticism toward group (especially “public”) schooling.
  
  I knew she had been won over to the cause when she observed a preteen boy at the movies, actively involved in a conversation with his parents. She whispered to me, “I bet he’s homeschooled.”
  
  I didn’t even know why she said so, but she explained that a group-schooled kid would not have been so comfortable with his parents — or so interested in discussing anything interesting with them.
  
  David Friedman, I’d love to hear more about how you approached unschooling. At this point I’d describe our own approach as a mixture of structured and “student-led.”
  
  Thanks much.
  
  BK
  
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  David D Friedman May 29, 2014 at 10:39 pm
  
  B.K.:
  
  You can find quite a lot I’ve written about home unschooling on my blog. http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=unschooling will find most of it, although not necessarily in order.
  
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Propertea May 28, 2014 at 1:56 am
I was homeschooled for most of my life. Socialization with peers that went to public schools, from 2nd grade to 8th grade, was absolute hell. I had nothing in common as I:
- Didn’t understand what they were saying due to the slang
- Was singled out for being “the homeschooler”
- Had nothing in common due to vastly different interests
- Cultural(?) differences all around
Seriously, boy scouts of america was bully central for me. I ended up not going to meetings and stopping at life scout. Even when I changed troops I had such a bitter taste in my mouth I skipped meetings and avoided it.

Now, for 9th to 12th I participated in a homeschool co-op which helped me find people that had a good balance between being socialized with government schoolers while being homeschoolers. It allowed me to learn how to interact with most “normal” people though during that period trying to socialize with people from public schools was still difficult just due to the cultural(?) differences.

College, however, has been a massive improvement, though I am looking at vocational options so I can pay for a college degree in the future without the loans.
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  B.K. Marcus May 28, 2014 at 9:50 am
  
  I think homeschool co-ops are very valuable. Part of the problem with generalizations about “homeschooling” is that there are such different approaches. I’m sure it’s a very small minority that keeps their kids isolated at home. We are fortunate that Charlottesville, where we live, has a very active homeschooling community, so (1) it’s easy to find other homeschoolers for our son to play with, and (2) the kids who go to group schools are used to encountering homeschooled kids at parks and afterschool activities, so our kids are less alien to them.
  
  I’d say that the non-homeschooling parents find us homeschooling parents more alien than their kids find our kids.
  
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Kathy Grable May 29, 2014 at 5:45 pm

Research into the origins of government “schooling” will explain that it is not education at all, in the sense that most folks think. It is behavioral training, animal training to respond to stimuli. Conformity, obedience, herd behavior (“peer pressure”) are the lessons of government skool. Immature minds that cannot defend are molded to learn their place in the planned society. Homeschooled kids are in the real world, interact with real folks of all ages in real ways. My mom told me after a few yrs of homeschooling “Your kids are different, they talk to us” (grandparents). I found that to be full vindication of my crazy decision to free my kids from the gulag. It was the best thing I’ve ever done..

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  B.K. Marcus May 29, 2014 at 8:33 pm
  
  Kathy, this comes up over and over again in my experience. Grownups are disoriented that homeschooled kids are willing to talk to them like real people. (Although I’ve noticed this about many Montessori kids, too.)
  
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  Kathy Grable May 30, 2014 at 6:18 pm
  
  I have a friend whose adopted “troubled” kids were put in a Montessori school. She loooved it! The kids did very well.
  
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Amber Moon June 21, 2014 at 11:12 am

Homeschooled kids act like real people.. real individuals.. not part of the borg..

“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.”

– H.L. Mencken
“…the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:

1. Obedient soldiers to the army;
2. Obedient workers to the mines;
3. Well subordinated civil servants to government;
4. Well subordinated clerks to industry
5. Citizens who thought alike about major issues.

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted – sometimes with guns – by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880’s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.”
http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Educate/public_school_nightmare.htm

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Daniel Davis June 22, 2014 at 5:55 am

I was homeschooled K through 12. My experience had many similarities to the comments made above. An interesting twist for me was that I also was on a farm in a very rural area. There was no children my age at all with similar interests. In fact there was just no children. I used to dream about having friends when I was a kid and what it would be like. My parents put me in Boy Scouts to help alleviate this problem. I experienced bullying somewhat but I didn’t really care about that. Once they saw that I didn’t care about teasing it was no longer fun for them. Also by the time I was 13 already was at the height of 6′ 2″. Overall I think the Boy Scouts was a positive experience for me and I got my Eagle so yay or whatever. The Homeschooling could have been better for me. I didn’t like my mother as a teacher and I preferred to teach myself. I have always been a independent learner and still am today. Looking back I’m glad I was homeschooled. It could have been done better but I still feel that my education is superior to most others. As far as social skills go I don’t have many friends but the ones I do have are the best. I care very little about what the general population thinks. To me they are just animals and trying hold a conversation with the average person fills like an act of bestiality. Don’t get me wrong I’m not anti-social, but I can’t take anyone seriously wearing something with YOLO or SWAG written on it.

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