Homeschooling and Socialization

From The Well-Adjusted Child by Rachel Gathercole

Think about it. Children have grown up into functional adults since the beginning of the human race, all being homeschooled. By living and learning in the real world, they learned to interact with people of all ages. Also, through observing the adults in their community going about their lives on a daily basis, they learned, in time, what was expected of people in their culture, what behaviors were accepted and effective, what qualities were valued and useful, and ultimately, how to be successful adults. As members of a social species, they learned to fit into their culture as effortlessly and naturally as they breathed and slept. Then one day about two hundred years ago, along came compulsory schooling. For various reasons, children began to spend their days in schools, where they were grouped by age and their social contact was limited to short stints during the day, during which they were able to interact briefly with peers their own age and adults who were forced by their circumstances to act as disciplinarians or instructors and little more. Still, this grouping was necessary because the schools were charged with the task of educating large numbers of children at once, using a very limited number of adults. Therefore, children had to be grouped roughly according to age so that material could be taught in a standardized rather than an individualized manner. The placing of same-age peers together in large groups (without other-aged children and adults), while unnatural, was a convenience and a pragmatic necessity.

Over the years, school took up more and more time and eventually became such a huge part of childhood that school life came to be viewed as synonymous with childhood itself. People forgot that there had ever been life without chalkboards, desks, and recess and could not imagine childhood without it. All children were students. All friends were fellow students. Being around large groups of peers was seen as not a convenience but an important and necessary part of growing up. Quite simply, school was childhood, and childhood was school.

By and by, a separate culture began to develop—a school culture. Children began to learn certain behaviors (some of them unhealthy) in order to get on in this ever-stranger environment in which, for the first time, the children had to fend largely for themselves. These behaviors included teasing, competitiveness, peer dependence, expressing a disdain for adults, excessive concerns about appearance and “sameness” with others, and so on. Soon these, too, came to be seen as normal—even necessary—traits for all children. A child who did not exhibit these characteristics would soon come to be viewed as abnormal. It was like an epidemic of pox that had spread to all members of a society and stayed so long that people forgot what it was like before the red spots and viewed people without them as freaks. Although people commonly complained about a growing “generation gap,” the failings of school systems, the deterioration of values among youths, violence in schools, and so on, still many people came to believe that it was necessary and inherently appropriate that children be in this environment and exhibit these behaviors. Eventually, it came to be thought that school, in spite of its failings, was the one right place for children to grow up and become socialized. Any other environment was, by default, barren, empty, unhealthy, and sad.

Still, a few people felt that their children didn’t belong there. And thus came homeschoolers. One by one, they said, “I think kids don’t have to go to school to learn or be healthy. I think my kids would be better served by being out of the schoolhouse and in the real world with their family and with the community at large.” And though everyone around them scoffed and worried, history suggested that these renegades and non-conformists appeared to be right: their kids achieved very highly academically and were ultimately sought after by colleges and universities because they, as a group, proved to be particularly well-prepared for college. Still, one concern nagged at the collective conscious: What about socialization?

As the homeschooling community grew, more and more were asked this question, as though homeschoolers had not thought to consider it. While they tried to explain again and again to no avail, their kids went on learning at alarming rates and developed close, happy friendships with more and more people. As the homeschoolers grew up and moved out into the world as successful, well-adjusted adults, still society demanded of them answers to the same question: What about socialization?

Today millions of families around the world have joined in to experience the countless benefits and unique lifestyle that homeschooling has to offer.