6 ms·

The typical retort to home/un-schoolers is about "socialization." The article addresses that here: What stood out, he adds, is that “many more said they felt t

The typical retort to home/un-schoolers is about "socialization." The article addresses that here: What stood out, he adds, is that “many more said they felt their social experiences were better than they would have had in school.” Sixty-nine percent were “clearly happy with their social lives,” he says, and made friends through such avenues as local homeschooling groups, organized afterschool activities, church, volunteer or youth organizations, jobs, and neighbors. In particular, “they really treasured the fact that they had friends who were older or younger, including adults. They felt this was a more normal kind of socializing experience than just being with other people your age.” For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school. Aside from not having friends your age, "adults" are also made to be the enemy through the power imbalance in a typical school. This makes it a bit harder to adjust to the real world in a subtle way that many take for granted. Early career professionals should be drawn to the most senior members of the organization to get the most knowledge they can, before that experience retires out of the company.

aklemm 6y ago
People have a hard time admitting that the normal school experience is often a negative socialization experience. When it's good, it's good, but it should be obvious that alternatives can also be good.
- ido 6y ago
  Like others I had a negative experience in a "normal" school. Not because of the other pupils but because of the system and (some of) the teachers. Kids will be kids regardless (aside from problematic settings such as coming from abusive and/or broken homes). I was a curious child and school did nothing to encourage that, if anything at best it failed to discourage me from learning. It seemed to have little intent beyond keeping kids busy so parents can work & sort them from most to least competent.
- nordsieck 6y ago
  > People have a hard time admitting that the normal school experience is often a negative socialization experience. For what it's worth, this is a very common result of shared suffering, from fraternity/sorority initiation rituals to compulsory military service.
- Eyght 6y ago
  For the first seven years of my schooling, I had the privilege of going to classes with only 8 pupils per teacher. During this time I felt like I had a personal relationship with each of the teachers, and that my schooling was a mutual effort. From the 8th year onwards, I went to schools where we were at least 30 pupils per teacher. During this time, dealing with teachers was more like dealing with a 'school official' rather than a person, and my schooling had turned into a number of abstract criteria contained in a standardized form. Ironically, I've had a much better experience at university, where courses often has had more than a hundred students and only one professor to manage it all.
- teekert 6y ago
  During Corona we had to home school our 7 y/o and our 3 y/o stopt going to play school (peuter speelzaal in the Netherlands). My son flourished, he was more social and at ease, showed interest in space and how the earth worked. I felt bad putting him back in school. My 3 y/o daughter though was whining constantly for the moment when play school would begin again.
  - aklemm 6y ago
    Yeah, exactly. Very similar to my experience during Covid lockdown. Our school is amazing too, but the kids really should only be there for like 4 hours rather than 7. It’s too grueling and doesn’t let them free enough. Of course, for most people life demands it.
jariel 6y ago
Self assessment is going to be difficult, doubly so when there is no basis of reference. 'Happiness' is not always the measure we are looking for, as school does sometimes put us in awkward positions we can learn quite a lot from. High School is a big place with a lot going on.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > 'Happiness' is not always the measure we are looking for I think it absolutely is. Certainly we don't want "local happiness": we should not trade overall life happiness for temporary happiness. But otherwise, yes, ultimately my goal in life is to be happy. For individual tasks and events, we have to accept that some things that make us temporarily unhappy will lead to the larger goal of overall happiness, and use that as motivation to get through the unpleasant stuff.
  - jariel 6y ago
    Children who get to run around and play video games all day would be 'happy' and they really wouldn't learn a lot now would they. 'Self assessed happiness' is therefore, only one, small, indirect measure of anything important.
hardwaregeek 6y ago
Students are also really fixated on being in the “right” year. I took a gap year. When I recommend other people take one, they sometimes respond that they don’t want to be behind by a year, either socially or academically. What they don’t understand is that being behind or ahead is a very arbitrary idea stemming from the structure of school. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things if you graduate a year later. Or if you learn a subject a year later than your peers
- threatofrain 6y ago
  You say a year but (1) colleges care how far you are in technical subjects like math, (2) you should care too because it affects what classes you take while in expensive college, (3) one year is what some students are looking at if they attempt some pedagogical plan, but others are looking at way more than one year of advancement. Without looking to extraordinary students, compare the lowest vs highest math tracks in schools, which is already an advantage in years. Sometimes advantages accumulate until you take a different pathway in life that was otherwise not a confident bet.
  - hardwaregeek 6y ago
    I'd counter that just because colleges care doesn't mean you should. Math in particular it's quite possible to pass a class without really understanding it. I'd wager that most students who took AP Calculus could not give a good definition of a limit. Indeed many math professors would much rather have students repeat calculus in college than blindly accept AP credit. Even if this allowed you to take more math classes, that wouldn't be much help if you don't know the fundamentals. Also gap years don't have any impact on the level you come into college. If anything I came into college far more advanced in CS than my peers because of my gap year.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - clausok 6y ago
      Just like you say, I passed the AP calculus exam in high school and then when I arrived at college my advisor, who also happened to teach a freshman Calculus 1 section, told me, "I know you passed out of it, but why don't you sit in on a couple of my classes and see what you think?" I ended up staying the whole semester when it became clear that I didn't understand anything about Calculus.
TimSchumann 6y ago
> For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school. This hit me hard. An interaction I had with a highschool friend last week got me thinking. Much of my perception around relationships and age were colored by the fact that I went to school with the same 60 people for nearly 20 years straight (small town) and almost never interacted with anyone outside of an incredibly narrow age band. I didn't really disabuse myself of that (mostly subconscious) way of interacting with other humans until my late twenties. Wonder what I missed. Also, just realized who I was replying to. Hey Clark, long time no see, hope you're well.
- clarkmoody 6y ago
  > Hey Clark, long time no see, hope you're well. Thanks!
- kortilla 6y ago
  School for 20 years straight in a small town? What country is that? In the US there is usually just K-12 in a single school system.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - TimSchumann 6y ago
    If it was an exaggeration, it was slight. I remember meeting people as a 3 year old in pre-school who I attended community college courses with.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > School for 20 years straight in a small town? What country is that? In the US there is usually just K-12 in a single school system. In a single school system, sure. The same small town is also likely to have preschool of 2-3 years, and maybe a public or private community or junior college or vocational school, which gets you 2-3 + 13 + 2 = 17-18 years, not far off of 20.
tprice7 6y ago
The other typical retort is this: in the real world, you often have to do boring and unpleasant tasks, and unschooled children are therefore unprepared for the real world, since they spent all their time doing whatever they want. The people who make this argument overlook the fact that coercion is not required for someone to be motivated to do unpleasant tasks. If you have a goal, you will be motivated to do the tasks that help you reach that goal. It's pretty much never the case that those tasks are uniformly pleasant for any nontrivial goal. And I don't believe that coercion is required for children to form constructive goals. I know I certainly had goals as a teenager that motivated me to do much more difficult and substantial things than anything I encountered in school, and in this case the coercion was in the opposite direction.
josh_fyi 6y ago
School is a place where, 80% of the time, children are explicitly forbidden to socialize.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
flukus 6y ago
Something that stood out to with recent shutdowns/WFH was the amount of people that rely on work for a social life. It seems many people just carry their school habits into the professional world and study/socialize morphs into work/socialize and they never really have a community outside of that. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people home schooled as kids are coping a lot better right now.
moltar 6y ago
100% agree about age difference from personal experience. I grew up in Soviet Union where I was free ranging in my “hood” after school, weekends and all summer. We had a big, diverse age group of friends. I’ve learned a lot from the older guys. Both factual knowledge and just how to behave / interact / fit in (soft skills). I also see a lot of this in Vietnam where kids are just hanging out without age discrimination and they seem to be super happy.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school. I think this is can be hit/miss, I was in private school from k-8 grade and having such young children present can actually stunt your development. They tried to appease the 8th graders perceived level of maturity with a 'buddy system' wherein you're responsible to look after a Kindergartner. I shared a boy, who happened to have autism before it was well understood and diagnosed in children in the 90s, with a girl in my class and he was the child of a teacher on campus. I believe she was at one point my 5th grade teacher. It was very awkward to say the least, because, first: I had no interest in pretending to be a faux-parent with this girl in my class with a child not my own, a girl who I had known for the better part of 6 years and it gave me a taste of how ill-prepared I'd be in raising children and how little interest I had in it. Second, I had even less desire to have to check in with the mother of this child on matters that pertained to what I could and couldn't say/do around this child due to his condition, and ultimately it just revealed that he clearly needed better care-taking skills than any 8th graders could provide. In a way it was reason to justify good birth-control practices, but that was hardly the aim, as I wouldn't see the value in mentoring younger minds until my late 20s to early 30s. All this really did was make me look deeper into the propensity of autism in children due to paternal aging, and it made me make efforts to freeze my sperm from 29 onward to try and avoid this possibility in my children as much as I could as after 35 the rates of autism due to the father's age goes up significantly. Later as a cell biologist I came to learn about the many benefits of opting for in-vitro fertilization, versus in-vivo, to be able to detect for other maladies in the embryo, with the main issue being the ever increasing cost(s) associated with it so I decided to pro-long having children well it into my 50s in hopes of technologies that would drop the costs significantly. However, when I was in Europe working on farms in my mid to late 20s it was typical for the children to be treated like adults from a very young age as they had to participate not just in school matters, but also had a vital role to fill on the farm's daily operations. To this day I have never seen such mature children in my entire life as I did when I lived and worked on a farm in the base of the Bernese Alps. These 3 children (ages 5-11) not only ate everything on their plates without any coaxing, including the vegetables they often helped grow in the fields, but also they took on chores cleaning the kitchen and feeding, herding, and milking the cows, before and after their school work and spoke to each other in such a way that made you think that these children, who still behaved like children when playing outside, were behaving more like they were in their mid to late teens. It was astonishing to see a 5 year old girl reminding the older kids to make sure they did their homework as she helped them get ready for school, and as she walked them to the bus stop several Km away from Home at 6am and then came back, dressed herself to then worked in the greenhouse for a few hours alongside me and her Mother. It still baffles me when I think about it. It's hard to explain, and I think this more a Nurture thing then it is a Nature thing, in my experience. I entered HS at 13, and to be honest if things were not done to prevent me from it I would have entered at 12, and the idea of going into that system at that age would have been entirely disastrous because I was still unprepared and perhaps infantile in many ways about most things, despite learning how to wrench on cars I also started to learn how to cook at a professional level. I excelled in other aspects in Life, and often worked with Adults in those aforementioned fields as I felt they had much insight to offer, but I was almost entirely useless at wanting to work/hang out with people my own age for the most part as I felt they had little to offer. They often offered nothing I was interested in and I often resorted to car/chef blogs, forums and chatrooms on the Internet, and later on car meet ups, to hang out with actually interesting people after school. In my Junior year I just decided to start going to University lectures instead of my HS classes instead, and while I never made any friends on campus until my Senior year it was still a much better dynamic that suited me way better than what I had been forced into due to my age.

aklemm 6y ago

People have a hard time admitting that the normal school experience is often a negative socialization experience. When it's good, it's good, but it should be obvious that alternatives can also be good.

ido 6y ago
Like others I had a negative experience in a "normal" school. Not because of the other pupils but because of the system and (some of) the teachers. Kids will be kids regardless (aside from problematic settings such as coming from abusive and/or broken homes). I was a curious child and school did nothing to encourage that, if anything at best it failed to discourage me from learning. It seemed to have little intent beyond keeping kids busy so parents can work & sort them from most to least competent.
nordsieck 6y ago
> People have a hard time admitting that the normal school experience is often a negative socialization experience. For what it's worth, this is a very common result of shared suffering, from fraternity/sorority initiation rituals to compulsory military service.
Eyght 6y ago
For the first seven years of my schooling, I had the privilege of going to classes with only 8 pupils per teacher. During this time I felt like I had a personal relationship with each of the teachers, and that my schooling was a mutual effort. From the 8th year onwards, I went to schools where we were at least 30 pupils per teacher. During this time, dealing with teachers was more like dealing with a 'school official' rather than a person, and my schooling had turned into a number of abstract criteria contained in a standardized form. Ironically, I've had a much better experience at university, where courses often has had more than a hundred students and only one professor to manage it all.
teekert 6y ago
During Corona we had to home school our 7 y/o and our 3 y/o stopt going to play school (peuter speelzaal in the Netherlands). My son flourished, he was more social and at ease, showed interest in space and how the earth worked. I felt bad putting him back in school. My 3 y/o daughter though was whining constantly for the moment when play school would begin again.
- aklemm 6y ago
  Yeah, exactly. Very similar to my experience during Covid lockdown. Our school is amazing too, but the kids really should only be there for like 4 hours rather than 7. It’s too grueling and doesn’t let them free enough. Of course, for most people life demands it.

jariel 6y ago

Self assessment is going to be difficult, doubly so when there is no basis of reference. 'Happiness' is not always the measure we are looking for, as school does sometimes put us in awkward positions we can learn quite a lot from. High School is a big place with a lot going on.

kelnos 6y ago
> 'Happiness' is not always the measure we are looking for I think it absolutely is. Certainly we don't want "local happiness": we should not trade overall life happiness for temporary happiness. But otherwise, yes, ultimately my goal in life is to be happy. For individual tasks and events, we have to accept that some things that make us temporarily unhappy will lead to the larger goal of overall happiness, and use that as motivation to get through the unpleasant stuff.
- jariel 6y ago
  Children who get to run around and play video games all day would be 'happy' and they really wouldn't learn a lot now would they. 'Self assessed happiness' is therefore, only one, small, indirect measure of anything important.

hardwaregeek 6y ago

Students are also really fixated on being in the “right” year. I took a gap year. When I recommend other people take one, they sometimes respond that they don’t want to be behind by a year, either socially or academically. What they don’t understand is that being behind or ahead is a very arbitrary idea stemming from the structure of school. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things if you graduate a year later. Or if you learn a subject a year later than your peers

threatofrain 6y ago
You say a year but (1) colleges care how far you are in technical subjects like math, (2) you should care too because it affects what classes you take while in expensive college, (3) one year is what some students are looking at if they attempt some pedagogical plan, but others are looking at way more than one year of advancement. Without looking to extraordinary students, compare the lowest vs highest math tracks in schools, which is already an advantage in years. Sometimes advantages accumulate until you take a different pathway in life that was otherwise not a confident bet.
- hardwaregeek 6y ago
  I'd counter that just because colleges care doesn't mean you should. Math in particular it's quite possible to pass a class without really understanding it. I'd wager that most students who took AP Calculus could not give a good definition of a limit. Indeed many math professors would much rather have students repeat calculus in college than blindly accept AP credit. Even if this allowed you to take more math classes, that wouldn't be much help if you don't know the fundamentals. Also gap years don't have any impact on the level you come into college. If anything I came into college far more advanced in CS than my peers because of my gap year.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - clausok 6y ago
    Just like you say, I passed the AP calculus exam in high school and then when I arrived at college my advisor, who also happened to teach a freshman Calculus 1 section, told me, "I know you passed out of it, but why don't you sit in on a couple of my classes and see what you think?" I ended up staying the whole semester when it became clear that I didn't understand anything about Calculus.

TimSchumann 6y ago

> For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school. This hit me hard. An interaction I had with a highschool friend last week got me thinking. Much of my perception around relationships and age were colored by the fact that I went to school with the same 60 people for nearly 20 years straight (small town) and almost never interacted with anyone outside of an incredibly narrow age band. I didn't really disabuse myself of that (mostly subconscious) way of interacting with other humans until my late twenties. Wonder what I missed. Also, just realized who I was replying to. Hey Clark, long time no see, hope you're well.

clarkmoody 6y ago
> Hey Clark, long time no see, hope you're well. Thanks!
kortilla 6y ago
School for 20 years straight in a small town? What country is that? In the US there is usually just K-12 in a single school system.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- TimSchumann 6y ago
  If it was an exaggeration, it was slight. I remember meeting people as a 3 year old in pre-school who I attended community college courses with.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > School for 20 years straight in a small town? What country is that? In the US there is usually just K-12 in a single school system. In a single school system, sure. The same small town is also likely to have preschool of 2-3 years, and maybe a public or private community or junior college or vocational school, which gets you 2-3 + 13 + 2 = 17-18 years, not far off of 20.

tprice7 6y ago

The other typical retort is this: in the real world, you often have to do boring and unpleasant tasks, and unschooled children are therefore unprepared for the real world, since they spent all their time doing whatever they want. The people who make this argument overlook the fact that coercion is not required for someone to be motivated to do unpleasant tasks. If you have a goal, you will be motivated to do the tasks that help you reach that goal. It's pretty much never the case that those tasks are uniformly pleasant for any nontrivial goal. And I don't believe that coercion is required for children to form constructive goals. I know I certainly had goals as a teenager that motivated me to do much more difficult and substantial things than anything I encountered in school, and in this case the coercion was in the opposite direction.

josh_fyi 6y ago

School is a place where, 80% of the time, children are explicitly forbidden to socialize.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

flukus 6y ago

Something that stood out to with recent shutdowns/WFH was the amount of people that rely on work for a social life. It seems many people just carry their school habits into the professional world and study/socialize morphs into work/socialize and they never really have a community outside of that. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people home schooled as kids are coping a lot better right now.

moltar 6y ago

100% agree about age difference from personal experience. I grew up in Soviet Union where I was free ranging in my “hood” after school, weekends and all summer. We had a big, diverse age group of friends. I’ve learned a lot from the older guys. Both factual knowledge and just how to behave / interact / fit in (soft skills). I also see a lot of this in Vietnam where kids are just hanging out without age discrimination and they seem to be super happy.

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school. I think this is can be hit/miss, I was in private school from k-8 grade and having such young children present can actually stunt your development. They tried to appease the 8th graders perceived level of maturity with a 'buddy system' wherein you're responsible to look after a Kindergartner. I shared a boy, who happened to have autism before it was well understood and diagnosed in children in the 90s, with a girl in my class and he was the child of a teacher on campus. I believe she was at one point my 5th grade teacher. It was very awkward to say the least, because, first: I had no interest in pretending to be a faux-parent with this girl in my class with a child not my own, a girl who I had known for the better part of 6 years and it gave me a taste of how ill-prepared I'd be in raising children and how little interest I had in it. Second, I had even less desire to have to check in with the mother of this child on matters that pertained to what I could and couldn't say/do around this child due to his condition, and ultimately it just revealed that he clearly needed better care-taking skills than any 8th graders could provide. In a way it was reason to justify good birth-control practices, but that was hardly the aim, as I wouldn't see the value in mentoring younger minds until my late 20s to early 30s. All this really did was make me look deeper into the propensity of autism in children due to paternal aging, and it made me make efforts to freeze my sperm from 29 onward to try and avoid this possibility in my children as much as I could as after 35 the rates of autism due to the father's age goes up significantly. Later as a cell biologist I came to learn about the many benefits of opting for in-vitro fertilization, versus in-vivo, to be able to detect for other maladies in the embryo, with the main issue being the ever increasing cost(s) associated with it so I decided to pro-long having children well it into my 50s in hopes of technologies that would drop the costs significantly. However, when I was in Europe working on farms in my mid to late 20s it was typical for the children to be treated like adults from a very young age as they had to participate not just in school matters, but also had a vital role to fill on the farm's daily operations. To this day I have never seen such mature children in my entire life as I did when I lived and worked on a farm in the base of the Bernese Alps. These 3 children (ages 5-11) not only ate everything on their plates without any coaxing, including the vegetables they often helped grow in the fields, but also they took on chores cleaning the kitchen and feeding, herding, and milking the cows, before and after their school work and spoke to each other in such a way that made you think that these children, who still behaved like children when playing outside, were behaving more like they were in their mid to late teens. It was astonishing to see a 5 year old girl reminding the older kids to make sure they did their homework as she helped them get ready for school, and as she walked them to the bus stop several Km away from Home at 6am and then came back, dressed herself to then worked in the greenhouse for a few hours alongside me and her Mother. It still baffles me when I think about it. It's hard to explain, and I think this more a Nurture thing then it is a Nature thing, in my experience. I entered HS at 13, and to be honest if things were not done to prevent me from it I would have entered at 12, and the idea of going into that system at that age would have been entirely disastrous because I was still unprepared and perhaps infantile in many ways about most things, despite learning how to wrench on cars I also started to learn how to cook at a professional level. I excelled in other aspects in Life, and often worked with Adults in those aforementioned fields as I felt they had much insight to offer, but I was almost entirely useless at wanting to work/hang out with people my own age for the most part as I felt they had little to offer. They often offered nothing I was interested in and I often resorted to car/chef blogs, forums and chatrooms on the Internet, and later on car meet ups, to hang out with actually interesting people after school. In my Junior year I just decided to start going to University lectures instead of my HS classes instead, and while I never made any friends on campus until my Senior year it was still a much better dynamic that suited me way better than what I had been forced into due to my age.