SOCIALIZATION VS SCHOOLING
If you think about removing your children from the formal school setting, you are likely to be peppered with questions about their social development. Regardless of how well your children fare academically, you are sure to be told that home schooling will retard their socialization.
What does socialization mean, though? Into what kind of setting will your children be socialized? What are the social norms your children will be expected to adapt to?
Children who attend public schools may have little in common but age and the zip codes they live in. In school, they have little contact with people much older or much younger. The adults they meet are authority figures, who tell them what to do and how to do it. The students don’t develop social relationships with the adults. In such a setting children will learn the dominant values of their classmates, then- the values of people who don’t know more than they do. They soon learn about social conformity, bullying, toadying, cliquishness, and gossip. Is this what we want them to learn?
In the formal school setting, few children can escape becoming peer-dependent. Peer dependency undermines creativity, empathy, and independent thought. As children become more peer-dependent, they are likely to lose respect for adults, themselves, and even their peers.
Standard schooling leaves little opportunity for socialization, anyway. Children are in tightly-controlled environments for most of their waking hours. They are in class from 7:30 to 3:00, in after-school activities from 3:30 to 5:00, and forced into homework from 5:00 to 7:00. While in school, they are forced to sit down and shut up, walk in line (single file- arms at sides), and raise their hands for permission to speak or to go to the bathroom. They compete with each other for grades. Laggards are ‘slow’ or ‘stupid’. Children who learn easily risk being called ‘teacher’s pets’.
In workplaces and other adult settings, we are not segregated by age or last name. We are not required to raise hands when conversing or answering calls of nature. Many of our activities are unscheduled, or we control the schedules. In most adult settings, we’re not in direct competition with almost everyone we meet. Can formal schooling, then, prepare us adequately for the social settings we will face as adults?
Given the way formal schooling actually functions, shouldn’t we at least question its value as a tool for socialization?
In a future post, we will explore alternatives- and their impact on social development.
(To get the most out of alternative education, you need a good internet connection. Talk to us. We can help.)