I am back, and more on homeschooling

I was out of country for a long time, with limited Internet access, thus no new entries. But I am back now and ready to write more. I found two comments on one of my past entries that I haven’t seen before, and would like to use them as a platform for future discussion. Thank you Chris and Cynthia for taking time to read my dormant blog, and for your comments!

Cynthia, thanks for your prospective as a recent high-school graduate. You start your comment by writing: "You might wish to be careful about how far you go as far as homeschooling. I can see your point about the failings in the school system, I just got out of high school, but be sure not to go isolationist." You are basically equating schooling to socialization, and you reiterate your point later on. Thus, the more one homeschools, the more isolated one is. I want to point out that learning and socialization are not the same things. And in fact in education the shift to emphasizing socialization is a relatively recent one (see e.g., Charlotte Izerbyt, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America"). Academics went down precisely as it started to happen. Because to me, socialization and academic learning are different, I don't immediately make a connection between homeschooling and being isolated. One can learn at home and then go out and socialize. And with the amount of extracurriculars children take these days, it is practically impossible to grow up isolated.

You say, "The job market being what it is from this point of view it's not what you know it's who you are socially". "Who you are socially" here is an interesting Freudian slip, IMO. This is what the school does very successfully, is molding you into one of the few social prototypes. The stereotypical ones would be the jock, the cheerleader, the popular, nerds etc. In real life there is slightly more the variety, but the basic picture is the same. And it is really amazing to observe the reemergence of these social roles when people congregate into the groups. I have been in a few of women’s clubs over the years, and there is always a struggle for popularity and influence, right along the old high school clique lines. The good part is that bitches have never won, at least in my experience, but still, it all is very amuzing.

But of course this is not what you really meant by “who you are socially”; you meant that being social and outgoing is a requirement for the modern job market. While social people do better anywhere, undoubtedly, it is also very obvious that there are different kinds of people and different jobs to do. A reporter or a PR officer must be social, while a researcher must be able to work on his own. And I would imagine that a naturally introverted person simply wouldn’t choose to be a PR officer, and instead would choose a job that better suits his/her natural temperament. But this is really self-explanatory.

What I want to point out that ‘being social’ and ‘working well in groups’, that you seem to equate, are, again, two different things. My husband was studying for his business degree in school just as I was working on my research degree. While I had to work on my own a lot, they were always required to do group projects. And I tell you, that was the stupidest thing, and had no relation whatsoever to the actual process that goes on at a workplace. The amount of time wasted on endless meetings and chit-chat was huge, the product substandard, and some people ended up shouldering a lot more work than others, creating grudges. In an actual workplace, everyone in a team has their relatively independent parts that they do; they get together to report on the progress, discuss the developments, and go on working on their parts again. And there is still a boss, you know, who supervises the project and tells you to do things. ‘Being social’ is reserved to lunch-time and political shmoozing, and we all know that it is important, but that alone wouldn’t get you anywhere.

I too am wishing you good luck in your endeavors, and please stop by again to read my blog!

Chris, I think that you are correct in principle in that homeschooling children are the same as general population: some social and outgoing, others more introverted. Yet, there is definitely a difference there too. I can’t yet say exactly what it is. There is a fact though there are no cliques and power struggles among the moms in the homeschooling groups I belong to, although there are conflicts sometimes. Go figure.

Thank you for stopping by, and please come again!