I agree with you, but I honestly haven’t seen public schools (or even private ones) really stepping up to teach these skills. Throwing kids to the wolves or just telling them to deal with it by themselves does not constitute skills instruction.
And frankly – munging a quote from Tori Amos – everyone’s teaching kids how to avoid or deal with bullies, but no one is teaching kids not to bully in the first place.
I have no idea if homeschooling does this better (some of the time, most of the time, or never), but I wouldn’t use this as an argument in favor of public school.
Wait, aren’t homeschooled children required to take the same standardized tests as public school kids? Wouldn’t it be possible to conduct a meta-study comparing test scores of kids enrolled in public schools, vs. those who are not? (Surely there are public/private/home school enrollment records somewhere, yeah?) That would solve the sample-bias problem, at least.
Again, I want to emphasize I’m not advocating bullying. I’m just saying it exists. Unless people live in a very controlled environment for their entire life, they’re going to encounter bullies. So they need to learn how to deal with a bully.
And that works both ways. Social experience also teachs children why being a bully is bad. A person with limited social skills might grow up to become a bully.
And bullying is just a single aspect of social skills. Children learn all sorts of other social skills in their peer group as well.
I’m not saying people can’t learn these social skills in other ways. But their opportunities will almost certainly be much more limited that those of children who spend forty hours a week with a large group of other children who they deal with on an ongoing basis.
I get that. I’m just saying that dropping kids into a large peer group, which will include bullies, and leaving them to sink or swim on their own is not a remotely effective method of teaching coping skills. We don’t expect kids to intuitively understand algebra, so why expect them to just somehow “figure out” how to deal with bullies?
Basically, I"m saying that I wouldn’t advocate that “public schools teach social skills better” when in my experience, public schools don’t teach these skills at all. Or even provide a whole lot of help. Kids are basically teaching themselves, which may or may not work out remotely well.
I strongly disagree with this statement. I was bullied horribly during a certain period of my schooling – mainly seventh through ninth grades. I have never been bullied, not even once, as an adult, and I’m 48 years old now. Even in college there was no bullying any more. The idea that kids must experience bullying in school to prepare them for life just doesn’t seem right to me.
I think your perception of this issue is completely wrong. A child’s peer group is not hostile in general. That’s what makes it a peer group. It’s true there’s a period, stretching roughly from 5th grade to 8th grade on average, when “friends” insult each other a fair amount, but by and large friends are friendly. Bullying comes from outside the individual’s immediate group of friends.
As for the idea that adult social groups are hostile, that’s just bizarre. If it’s true for your social group, ditch it and get a new one.
That varies by state. When we were in Louisiana there were at least two ways to register with the state: (1) as a private educational facility and (2) as a home study program. We chose the latter. The state required that we complete and be able to prove a minimum number of instruction days and to prove grade equivalency. Every spring we gave our kids the California Achievement Test (CAT). We did not have to give those scores to the state, but rather kept the results on file in case we were ever audited. So I doubt the data are out there in an easily obtainable form.
It’s clear that those who have their minds made up that institutional education is the cornerstone to social development are not going to change their minds based on this thread. I wonder, though, if they are protesting that as much as they are protesting that parents who home school maintain greater control over the amount of indoctrination state and private entities are able to give their children in the educational arena.
No, I will say that if you haven’t been bullied as an adult, by an adult, you’ve been very lucky. I have had some astonishingly lousy supervisors in my time; and the reality is, you don’t always have the option to just pick up and leave your job.
Hell, I had one boss who lied about me to another department’s manager in order to cover her own ass. I was copied on an email to him that said she “didn’t know why” I hadn’t finished his project. The reason, as she knew perfectly well, is that she’d never told me about said project. Her response, when I politely and privately pointed this out, was that “it didn’t matter.”
I did walk out at that point, but that was only possible because I’d toughed out her crap for three months, and saved money like a fiend. And the economy wasn’t in the toilet at that time.
I don’t know. The place to look would be the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA).
I don’t know anyone in our orbit of home school groups who was ever audited, mainly because these folks all actually did home education in compliance with state guidelines. The rumor was that the only time the state really came out to audit was when the neighbors called to complain that the Snopes up the street were endangering the welfare of their children and hiding behind the home education laws to do so.
I just quizzed my wife on the reporting to make sure I got it right. She confirms that we did not have to turn in test scores, but that she did so as to prove grade equivalency w/o there being any questions about it.
Interesting (wow, I only asked out of idle curiosity, I had NO idea how heated this subject is). At any rate, from what I understand of my friends and acquaintances who have home-schooled (I’m a recent transplant to Seattle from Anchorage), there are basic requirements of home-schoolers. They would have to complete specific packets and mail them back to the governing educational authority.
In addition, they had to have PE and other outings. From the posts I see here, I’m guessing that other states are a lot looser in terms of what they require for a student to pass each grade?
It really, really depends on the state. You can look up a list of the requirements for each state (I’m not a fan of HSLDA, but the info there is accurate). Some states are fairly stringent, others extremely loose. When I was an independent homeschooler in CA, I was a private school, and I registered every year, but I never had to do any testing. Now we take the STAR test every year and I can show you fancy graphs of my children’s progress as compared with the grade level average.
It’s pretty well impossible to get an accurate and complete picture of all homeschoolers in the US. We don’t really even know how many there are. Every state does it differently, and you always have a small number of people who are violently opposed to anyone knowing anything about them at all and who fly under the radar (and those people may be left or right). Quite a few homeschoolers (again, left or right both) think standardized tests are evil and refuse to have their children take them, at least until they’re older.
Homeschoolers use every possible permutation of curriculum, government oversight, or avoidance thereof. And these days they come in every possible philosophical flavor, race, and creed. Generalizations are as impossible as generalizations about Americans.
Great point. We have met and interacted with black, white, Indian, Russian expatriate (descendants of the wrong side of the revolution - Vena’s grandmother took piano lessons from Tchaikovsky), Christian, agnostic, liberal, conservative, etc., etc. That all in south Louisiana. Each family had a different underlying reason for choosing home education.
Sorry. HSLDA probably could tell you how often home education programs are audited by the states and can definitely tell you what each state requires from home educators in the way of registration, reporting, and compliance.
My parents are both retired teachers. They both say that the vast majority of students they taught who were previously home schooled (and since returned to the public school system) were always behind their peers in pretty much everything. Where I am from one of the major reasons for homeschooling was the lack of religion in the public schools.
It’d be interesting to know what ages they taught. IME, the US school system is emphasizing literacy skills at ever-earlier ages, despite fairly solid research showing that such an early emphasis does not have long-term significant benefits. I’ve talked to teachers who had second-graders enter their classes from Montessori schools barely able to recognize their own name, but by the end of the year the kids are about on grade level, because developmentally most seven-year-olds are ready to take off in reading.
That may not be what’s going on in the cases you’re talking about, but it’s a possibility.
I have always been of the opinion that every boy somewhere between 10-14 NEEDS to get his ass handed to him..just once. Knowing you are not invincible is a useful lesson that unfortunately only gets delivered one way.
Last I checked, your boss was not part of your peer group. I would even argue that a boss can’t actually be a bully, because part of being a bully involves not having any actual power over you, and then making up for it with threats of violence or at least social ridicule.
Dealing with someone who does not respect the people under them is a completley different skillset. You deal with bullies by either showing them that they don’t have power over you, or by fighting back. You can’t do that with a boss. As you pointed out, all you have are self-preservation techniques.
I have to admit I wasn’t bullied in school. I was always really good at assimilating into social groups. It’s only now that I’ve gotten older that I realize I don’t have to try to fit in with people whose behavior and morals are very, very different than my own. But my sister was bullied, and she did learn to deal with it. But the skills she learned are 100% not helping her with dealing with the bad boss she has now, as she can’t run and tell the teacher on them, and ignoring them doesn’t work.
As I pointed out in my earlier post, most homeschoolers do seem to lack some social skills when they get out, but it’s not like they can never learn them. A few years after being in college, they seem to do a better job than most, as they don’t obtain any baggage from the learning experience, and are dealing with actual adults, rather than kids.
I wish the social skills I learned as a kid were still relevant to being an adult, but they really aren’t.
Thanks for mentioning Montessori schools. I went to one. Like my peers from that school, I was far ahead of everyone else when I came in. School was a breeze because I had learned how to learn for myself and not depend on the teachers to force feed me information.
And, yet, every person I talk to assumes that Montessori student are so very far behind. I can only assume that is because most children quit the system either too early or too late. I quit as soon as I had learned everything they could teach. Not before, when I would have still been behind, and not after when I would have stagnated from lack of anything to do.
Either that, or most people who go to Montessori schools have developmental challenges. That is why they were invented, after all. The fact that they even out is a testament to the idea that Montessori schools actually work.