Because sometimes the best way to tell a story is through humorous bastardization of the Bayeux Tapestry*.
*And here’s your history geek moment of the day: The Bayeux tapestry is not actually a tapestry (which is woven), but an embroidery on cloth.
**I think this still counts for my NaBloPoMo, because I had to do a lot of screen printing and photoshopping, as the image gallery seems to no longer be supported.
Danielle at Merryment and Mayhem asks, “Can you expound more on socializing as a homeschool parent/student? I would like to homeschool and this is my husband’s main argument against it. He thinks there are things that ’school teaches you that your parents can’t teach you’ though he has yet to tell me what exactly these things are (we’re working on this, as we don’t even have kids yet!).”
For starters, Danielle, is your husband’s concern about socializing or socialization? I think that’s at the root of many misconceptions about homeschooling right that, that socializing and socialization are the same thing. They aren’t, however, and they don’t serve the same purpose. Socialization is the process through which a child learns the customs, behaviors, and expectations of certain culture/society. Socializing is getting together for a social/common purpose. It’s an activity, not a process. My children, homeschooled though they may be, have opportunities for socialization and socializing.
As far as socializing go, my children do get to spend time with other children of roughly the same age group. We are involved in the homeschool soccer league and Math Olympiad. We have playdates with other families, homeschooler and otherwise. Patchfire and I have set up a weekly family get-together for Thursday afternoons, now that soccer is over for the season. My children also have friends in the neighborhood (and in my mother’s neighborhood) that they play with several times a week. They get invited to birthday parties. They hang out and play video games with buddies. I don’t keep them in a bubble and they don’t lack the ability to strike up friendships and conversations with peers. I’d say that means they’re reasonably good at socializing.
Socialization is an ongoing process and it’s not a concrete one. There isn’t one way to be socialized. Socialization starts at birth and is developed in the family setting. I certainly can thinks of aspects of popular culture and commonly acceptable social behaviors to which I do not want them socialized, and that is one very strong reason why I choose to homeschool. “Socialization” in an of itself isn’t inherently good or bad, but your culture’s rules and expectations can certainly be good or bad, moral or immoral, and I want to have that additional level of control over the culture into which my child is being socialized. I don’t want my children well-socialized to the bullying culture common in so many public schools. I don’t want them to be a part of the Lord of the Flies behavior common in some peer groups. I don’t see anything wrong with eschewing that particular aspect of socialization.
My children are, however, being socialized in the aspects of decent and polite interaction with others. That isn’t something you get from peers solely or even primarily. It’s modeled by the adults around them. It’s practiced through controlled social interaction. It’s experienced through interactions with intellectual or interest-based peers, rather than age-based. I don’t feel a large group of often poorly-supervised 10-year-olds has a lot to offer Captain Science in the way of the particular brand socialization that I’d like to see him develop. I do think he is being well-socialized into a culture of mixed age-groups, where he spends time with older and younger children, adults, teachers/coaches, family, and social groups assembled based on similarity of interest and personality. I think he’s developing ways of interacting with the world that will do him much better than the pack mentality I have seen evidences in many institutional (public or private) school settings. He’s different socialized, but that’s not a bad thing. He’s very social and he’s able to deal with a wide variety of people, at least as well as any slightly-surly prepubescent kid can be.
The issue of socializing/socialization seems to be a major sticking point for people who are against homeschooling, but I can’t figure out why that is, exactly. Are they really so threatened by the idea of someone being different? Is this the only thing they can specifically come up with to explain their otherwise hard-to-pin-down concerns about homeschooling? Of all the questions I’m asked about homeschooling, “are homeschooled kids socialized” seems to be the one I hear the most. I like this little video. A little heavy-handed (most people aren’t so dense that they can’t eventually understand what we’re talking about re: socialization), but sort of a nice representation of the sheer onslaught of concerns expressed over socialization. Just pretend that this one clueless mom represents ALL clueless people. 
Anyway, the [Smrt] Homeschooler thinks she’s doing a pretty good job with socializing her children and allowing them plenty of opportunities to socialize. I just don’t think they’re exactly the same thing or that my children need to be socialized in the way deemed best by people who don’t live our lives.
Do you have a question for the [Smrt] Homeschooler? Email them to
smrtmama@smrtlernins.com
Why, why, why do the mommy groups all plan their activities for traditional school hours?
Ok, I understand why it works for them. They can ditch their older children on the public school system and now want to use that time to do their various mommy activities. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to understand that those times are really not the best for their homeschooling friends–or if they understand it in theory, they either don’t understand it in practice or don’t particularly care–and either get miffy about our expressions of scheduling dismay, start the process of subtle exclusion from that social group, or both.
I’d love to attend some local parenting group activities. I really would. I’d love to be more involved in local birth and breastfeeding advocacy organizations. I’d love to go to cloth diapering workshops, play dates for toddlers at various parks, and moms-only coffee at the local coffee shop. Unfortunately, I do not have someone else available to educate my kids for me.
Believe it or not, the flexibility of homeschooling doesn’t mean I can go to some adult- or toddler-geared activity multiple days a week. I know you’re all shocked, but Captain Science has to do his schooling at some point, and that point needs to not be dinner time. Even if we were one of the “done by noon” homeschooling families, we still couldn’t make all these 10am activities for small children, because Captain S is still there. He doesn’t magically disappear during school hours. He can’t stay here alone while I cart Babypie and Tank off to play dates. He can’t go to music time or story time without being the inappropriately old, freakishly tall boy at whom the other parents look askance when he smiles at or talks to their toddlers, and frankly, I don’t want some stranger-danger fearing mama mentally profiling my sweet and innocent 9-year-old son as someone who might in some way be a threat to her baby, simply because he’s friendly and doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
As much as I joke about doing something and “counting” it as a lesson (example: “Going to Costco involves a lot of walking. Totally counting that as P.E. for today!”), we are not a homeschooling family whose educational philosophy is based primarily on getting out of the house and doing stuff. We aren’t unschoolers; We have quite a lot of formal curricula to work through in a week. We also have other lessons and classes, scheduled for, amazingly enough, school hours, and no school bus is going to come to take Captain Science to and fro.
In a perfect world, the “crunchy” mama set would realize that many of their number homeschool, but this world is far from perfect. I’m watching homeschooling slowly, ever so slowly, result in a gradual exclusion from many of my former social groups. Part of it might be natural growth, as our children are taking different paths, but I think that much of it just has to do with the fact that my “free” time is now decidedly less expansive, my entourage size doesn’t change based on school hours (it’s always Smrt Mama + 3), and I can’t meet up with most of my non-homeschooling friends/groups with enough frequency to maintain the friendships/sense of membership.
I feel like I spend so much time talking about exclusion — from the homeschooling world as a whole, due to secularity, from secular homeschooling, due to rigorous classical curricula. This is just one more facet of that. The inconvenience of the rigorous homeschooling schedule can be a stumbling block in maintaining pre-homeschooling friendships and activities.
Nana (my mother) used to work in our county’s public school system — first as a substitute teacher, then as a parapro, and finally as a PE teacher (before “retiring” to help take care of Captain Science while I finished my undergrad). She often referred to the children at her school as the “bubble wrap children of [NanaSchool] Elementary” due to overt helicopter parent over-protectiveness exhibited by the majority of the [s]mothers (and some fathers bothers) at the school.
One great example of this is during the Presidential Fitness Challenge. The children had to run a short distance in order to meet the standards. Apparently, many of these kids had never run before, because they were stopping in the middle of the run, completely freaked out, because…
Their hearts were beating fast and it was hard to breathe while they were running!
They would then go, wailing miserably, to the front office to call their mommies, who would come snatch their fragile darlings up out of school to take them home, declaring that they MUST have asthma (undiagnosed, of course, and oddly enough, completely asymptomatic otherwise) and should therefor never be made to do any hard physical exertion.
Whenever someone makes a comment to me about the sheltered existence of homeschooled children, I think of the bubble wrap children of [NanaSchool] Elementary, and I smile.
Yes. Sheltered. That’s totally us.
