When I was kid, my peers hated me. In hindsight, I imagine it was because I was unabashedly different; I like far different things than they did, I complained about the teacher going to slow (which I’m sure made the rest of the students feel just peachy), and I was socially awkward. These are crimes at which children show very little pity, and I didn’t have wealth or physical prowess to fall back on.
I spent most of my childhood hiding: from ice-balls thrown at me, from being pelted with rocks, from people trying to force me into the creek. I was also the victim of several cruel (not that it needs to be said) but untrue rumors, and horrible bait-and-switches from cruel girls of the “Do this and we’ll be your friend forever” variety.
The teachers were never any help, and the administrators, if anything, tended to be worse. The best I can say about them is I never was in trouble from retaliating* against my bullies, which I did do from time to time. I’m not terribly proud of it, but a few tears and an “They’re lying!” was enough to cover any physical retaliation I ever did, but in most cases was never an issue, because they weren’t going to say anything to teachers about me hitting them. At the end of the day, who were they going to believe? The bright, sweet-looking child who didn’t have so much as a blemish that wasn’t a missed homework or a tardy, or the kids that were always in-and-out of time-out (and later, detention) for fighting, cursing, and disturbing the class?
I never told my parents. I figured out fairly quickly that my dad respected bullies and other “strong” people; in fact he was a bully when he was in high school.
Hubby doesn’t have much of a better story.
Threads about bullying are full of people with similar stories. Sometimes the victims end up committing suicide. Sometimes they end up murdering students. Most of the time, victims figure out some sort of coping mechanism; based on my observations, I think sarcasm is probably the most common.
Now, not to bury the lead or anything, but it’s time to get back to the topic of this post. The number one reason people say that homeschooling is wrong is because children won’t get properly “socialized”.
Based on the number of people that had to live through bullying, and the complete lack of any systematic effort to stop it, I’m calling bullshit, hard. Public school does not properly socialize anyone, it teaches children to become bullies, victims, or learn the nifty trick of “not my problem”. That is not a socialization I want to give my kids at all.
My heart goes out to the 11-year old boy who probably wanted to live, but couldn’t think of away out of the daily horror that bullying does to a young mind. I think that it’s time that we re-look at our schools, and what exactly we’re teaching our students.
*With the exception of one extremely terrible teacher, who really was only teaching until she could pick up a husband. No really, she told us that, many times. She actively egged on the bullies.
**The first time, I hit a guy back, it was because he lifted up my skirt to flash everyone my underwear. I turned around a belted him one (although it was a very poor punch). A teacher saw the underwear flash, briefly, but really saw the punch. I told the truth, and was given several days of “time-out” (no recess; this was way back in elementary school), and told that I need to be able to take a joke. The boy, to my knowledge, never received a punishment. For years later, I would scream bloody murder when forced into a dress, and because of my vehemence against skirts, my peers would think it’s great fun to flash my undies every time I showed up to school in them. As a child, I thought it was “mean” and made me feel self-conscious about myself. From my adult, feminist eyes, this is “sexual assault”. From the teachers eyes, it was just “kids being kids”. After the first time, I made sure that the retaliation was away from the teachers eyes, and that I denied everything to the administrators.
Honestly, that “socialization” stuff is bullcrapola. My second ex had two older siblings who homeschooled all their kids. When the four oldest hit college, they had no trouble at all, neither academically nor socially.
I understand that. I’ve been there. And it pissed me off how hypocritical everything was. I went to Catholic school, and the same people who bullied acted like humble servants of Chirst at mass. So you bring up a very important point about homeschooling. My only issue with it is that people use homeschooling as a means of instilling hard religious “training” on kids while protecting them from outside ideas. Of course, they have a right to do that as parents. I have seen through my cousins how sheltering kids backfires. Still, as parents they have every right to raise their kids however they want, and you have that same right so take advantage of that.
Among the other types of bullying, I wonder if I was the only victim of drive-by yogurt pelting.
I feel the same way. I was bullied horribly as a child. Even now I am shocked when people treat me like a human being, because it was just not what I ever got for the first 17 years of my life from my peers. That shit can really fuck a person up.
The fact that for girls it so often takes the form of tolerated sexual harassment and assault, makes me think that when people say it is important because of “socialization,” what they really mean is that we it is important because:
1) we need to teach little girls that if they are sexually assaulted, not only will no one care, but they will probably punish her for it, so they will grow up to be submissive man-pleasers who keep mum about their many violations from men; and
2) we need to teach little boys that if they are sexually harassed and assaulted in the form of homophobic taunts and intra-gender bullying, no one will care if they were effeminate in the slightest; and
3), that if you are a girl and other girls conspire to torment you physically and mentally – especially if you are smart and dorky and therefore were “asking for it,” that their word will always be more reliable than yours (because all little girls are equally unreliable, and therefore the majority story must be the factual one, according to a shitload of asshole school administrators in my day) to teach little girls that no one cares – not men, not women, so they will grow up to be either submissive woman-pleasers, too, or, preferrably, will give up on women and focus entirely on pleasing men (because at least with men, though you get the same shit, you’d get the patriarchally constructed reward of “sex” and status among women for winning the man-prize. The option of foregoing the violations altogether has been removed as an option via 1).).
I like the idea of homeschooling if there were legit teachers with credentials and not just some stay at home mom.
Without those poor experiences, would you be the same person? Would have overcome? If you shield your kids into a bubble, then they have a sense of entitlement. Oh well, do what you must, but if “bullying” is what you’re scared of, then you’re really not putting much faith in the ability of your child to overcome.
It’s like pulling the rug from under him, or better yet, not letting him to even get on the rug at all.
“I like the idea of homeschooling if there were legit teachers with credentials and not just some stay at home mom.”
This is one form of homeschooling, and it’s far from the most common one. This one is really common:
http://homeschooling.suite101.com/article.cfm/homeschooling_coops
My ex-in-laws did this (and are still doing this) with their kids. They ended up getting extremely high-quality education for their kids from other parents with advanced degrees in math, science, business and English–way better credentials in terms of the subject matters that what was being offered at the local public schools.
Also, what would you consider some “stay at home mom,” and do you have any stats to back that up? By the time I graduated high school, for instance, I’d already taken more math than a lot of public school teachers ever see. And then I got a college degree too. I would be really surprised to learn that the majority of homeschooling moms are undereducated–I suspect it’s the opposite.
“f you shield your kids into a bubble, then they have a sense of entitlement. Oh well, do what you must, but if “bullying” is what you’re scared of, then you’re really not putting much faith in the ability of your child to overcome.”
We’re talking homeschooling, not Bubble Boy. Even regular school is only 6 or 7 hours a day at most, and 9 months out of 12 at most–your kids spend plenty of time around other kids outside of homeschool hours. Not to mention that most homeschooled kids end up doing a lot of community activities and extracurriculars–easily as much as public school kids and frequently far more.
Oh well, do what you must, but if “bullying” is what you’re scared of, then you’re really not putting much faith in the ability of your child to overcome.
Wow, way to trivialize our experiences. No one should have to “overcome” daily violence and ostracization from their peers, especially not as children. We don’t make adults put up with this shit. Why should we make children?
I have a degree, that “credentialed” enough for you? And stay-at-home moms normally know quite a lot, but nope, clearly they must be idiots if they decide to do something for other reasons than money.
I’d probably be a better person who didn’t have shit for self-esteem and a low tolerance for people who ask really useless questions. How the hell should I know, it’s not like I can go back and time and verify.
Overcome what, pumpkin? I’m suicidally depressed, and have difficulty to this day with interpersonal relationships. But I’m sure it’s just because I’m “Not strong enough”, not that I was subject of stuff that would be torture if we did it to prisoners.
Who said anything about a bubble? If anything, I want my kids to have a wide view of the world, not just a narrow little suburban bubble.
Fuck off, scare-quote jerk-off. What I was submitted to was bullying, and what others have submitted to was bullying. This isn’t shit that people “overcome”, it doesn’t build character, it maims you.
No, sending a child to public school is about pulling the rug out from underneath them before she even has a chance to get on her feet.
You know, do me a favor: don’t have kids. You sound like you’d be the “teach them to bully” type.
Most homeschoolers are careful to provide for actual socialization experiences for their kids. When I was running a homeschoolers’ advice and cover-enrollment program, one of the things we did was distribute pamphlets of advice. Our advice on socialization was that the kids should have some activities with other people of mixed ages, including kids, and some with adults outside the family who could take the child’s study program seriously, and contribute seriously to it. We believed this scheme provided much better “socialization” than incarceration with a bunch of kids having nothing much in common except their birthdates.
When I was a kid, the “socialization” in my school was such that I was constantly in trouble for repaying violence with violence. My attitude was that I should be so violent that they would leave me alone thereafter. So, in the fourth grade I broke a boy’s nose with a textbook. In the third grade, I repaid a girl bully with a cup of yogurt poured into her hair. I got left alone eventually, but I vowed my kids would have an easier time of it. Yes, it does maim you, whether you “win” or “lose”. We send our kids to school to learn, not to “overcome” unrelated obstacles.
Lisa KS:
It’s weird that you linked that, because honestly, that’s what I had in my head as a more ideal school situation. This way everyone could still keep their paying job, but kids would get good education.
Fun.
School isn’t for socialising kids, it’s for institutionalising them.
That said, homeschooling is a peculiarly American phenomenon – I don’t know if there’s anywhere else in the world where it’s so socially normalised. Maybe that’s just a result of the Christian homeschooling movement and all the deference they’ve sucked up? Cloud, silver lining, etc.
I’m glad you were brave enough to post this, Antigone…I wouldn’t be. I still don’t want to talk about my bullying experiences because I still feel like it was ‘my fault’ and I should be ashamed of them, because I can see where I made mistakes. Even though I remember being so damn angry at the institutions involved at the time. Little girls are not meant to get angry about being treated unfairly.
My sister made the conscious decision to be homeschooled about midway through seventh grade. She felt she wasn’t challenged much by our catholic school. My mother agreed with it, and my sister wound up spending a year and a half working on her Neopets account. She had token projects and that sort of thing, but she then consciously decided to go to public high school (which I wish I had done, I chose to go to private and regret it) where she did extremely well for herself.
I never really recall any bullies when I think back to my schooldays though. I don’t know if they sometimes don’t exist, if I was antisocial enough for them to simply not notice me, or what, but I never got the traditional bullying experience (with the possible exception of my father, but that’s probably different). Maybe I’m better off for it, maybe not, I dunno. I do know that my sister CHOSE to go to high school. She wanted the social interaction with other people she wasn’t getting because my mom didn’t do all the work.
Schools function as a socializing mechanism by providing curricular and extra-curricular activities easily for children. It’s not just similar age ranges, there are also similar hobbies and preferences. For example, I was in the strategy gaming club in high school, and that was by far and large my small social group in high school. I played intramural sports during my lunch hour. I was in the chorale. These are things that take a lot of work to dig up and enroll in for homeschoolers, but were provided to me on a silver platter for no extra money in a school environment. So please, don’t take it to mean that Bullies are what socialization is. They are a threat, yes, and a decided con to schools public and private, but they should not be held to be definitive of the school social scene.
TRH
“Other than the food, the service, and the ambience, the place was great. Cheap.”
In the interests of total honesty though, even if I could ever have afforded to homeschool my kids (mostly not), I wouldn’t have done it. I’m just not drawn to elementary education as a career.
These are things that take a lot of work to dig up and enroll in for homeschoolers
You’d be surprised. I choose to be unschooled for the last three years of high school. Finding activities was never a problem for me, and no my mom didn’t do the extra work to find them for me. She was a single mom trying to get two of us through high school and into college, while working a more than full-time job. She didn’t have time to track these things down for me.
Granted it probably helped that my school district let homeschooled students living in the district participate in extracurricular clubs and sports. But I only attended one club at the school, the rest were other organizations.
Lisa KS;
That’s actually not a problem for me. I like teaching, and seriously considered a teaching degree. I stopped when I realized that the professors teaching these classes hadn’t been around an actual child in over two decades.
Plus, as it looks right now, my career is going to be “low skilled wage slave” so, it’s not like I have a particular investment in any job.
I’m basically exactly the opposite. I’ve thought about homeschooling my kids, but I don’t think I could ever do it. Ever. Somebody would die and I’d spend the rest of my life in prison.
And I’m a teacher, so it isn’t that I don’t like teaching, because I love it, and I’m really good at it. It’s just that I don’t think I could be a good teacher to my own kids. I have less patience with them and their antics and I expect a lot more of them than I do with other people’s kids.
Right now we’ve got the kid in a private Montessori school which permits absolutely no bullying, and can enforce that, because there are only a few kids in each class/grade — also, the kids enforce it. (“What happens if someone makes fun of someone else?” I asked my kid one day, fascinated, since my school experiences were as evil as most of y’alls.
“Everyone gets on you, and someone goes to tell the teachers right away,” she said, very seriously. “We’re a family. We don’t *do* that!”)
But what we’ll do when she’s 12 and has to go to middle school, I shiver to think. I’ve heard from my students what goes on in the local schools.
It doesn’t make anyone tough. It makes you broken. I still have problems trusting my peers and trusting authority because of those years in grammar and middle school. (By high school, I had totally shut down.)
Great post. Especially this:
Public school does not properly socialize anyone, it teaches children to become bullies, victims, or learn the nifty trick of “not my problem”. That is not a socialization I want to give my kids at all.
Yes, yes, yes.
“Just some stay-at-home mom.” Way to belittle mothers. Excellent.
So am I qualified to teach my future children since I let my certification lapse in the five years since I’ve been a classroom teacher, or do I need to go back to get recertified? Or can we assume the subsequent hands-on years in my field have given me sufficient continuing knowledge and that I will not push my brains out of my vagina along with my child?
I’ll also let my friend with the master’s degree know that she’s just some stay-at-home mom because she has no teaching credential. She chooses to stay home with her two kids because one is very bright and will languish in a class too slow-paced for her, and the other is on the autism spectrum and needs more individualized attention than a public school in their tax-poor community can provide for him. Mom put them in community nursery school for a while and discovered that the teachers didn’t know how to handle either of her kids. So Mom orders the appropriate grade level curriculum from a company for each of them, all three do activities together, and Mom has each work on what is appropriate. No one picks on the boy for his disabilities, except sometimes at the playground, in which case his big sister is there to make sure no one messes with her brother. Book club, group music lessons, and 4-H allow them to interact with other kids under adult supervision.
It’s cool, I say let the haters hate. I’ve never understood why people feel so threatened by home schoolers (those who do it right of course, not the 6,000 year old Earth nut jobs). My brother and I are some of the most well adjusted people I know. We interacted with tons of people growing up, participated in plenty of extra curricular activities, and graduated from well-respected universities.
I also know some well adjusted private and public school kids, and some people who were deeply fucked by the system but are still lovely people. There isn’t one right way to raise a kid and if home schooling works for some people chill the fuck out and stop being total assholes about it.
And apparently I have a lot of pent up rage right now, but it has nothing to do with home schooling* and everything to do with grad school.
*also, everybody has issues/flaws. Sometimes I don’t tell people I was home schooled because then they see my flaws as normal and human, not as some horrible psychological scarring due to home schooling.
“I’ve never understood why people feel so threatened by home schoolers”
Generally for a couple of reasons. First, because they feel that only cranks want to homeschool their kids, and that their reasons primarily involve religious and/or political indoctrination, or even child abuse. See e.g. the Texas raid on the FLDS compound, which you’ll recall was quite the example of bipartisan “other”-bashing. Second, homeschooled kids have a nasty habit of embarrassing public school kids in academic metrics, while stubbornly failing to turn into socially stunted religious cultists as is constantly predicted.
Third, it occurs to me, they do all this while their families are still paying their share in taxes to support the public schools, with no deduction for home school expenses. Which does some violence to the conventional wisdom that all problems with K-12 education can be fixed by throwing money at them.
Stacy-
I don’t think it’s the conventional wisdom that all problems with K-12 education can be fixed by throwing money at them. If that was the case, someone would have, you know, actually tried that. What I hear as the conventional wisdom is “raising standards” a fuzzy term if any.
Okay, let me preface my attempt at a defense of public schooling by pointing out a couple of things: 1) I’m Canadian, living in a large city, so my experience of public education is slightly different. I should also point out that I went to a private girls’ high school, in part because our local publicly funded Catholic school was a toxic and uninspiring environment for me. As a final prefatory statement, I strongly uphold the right of any parent to homeschool their child, send their child to private school, or find whatever way they can of ensuring that their child receives the attention it needs as long as that child is indeed gaining access to the skills necessary to function as a responsible adult*
One of my biggest ideological problems with homeschooling or private education as a de facto response to the problems of the public education system is that it removes from the pool of those with the strongest interest in public education those parents and children whose needs and ideologies don’t conform to the norm. As a result, there are fewer deeply invested voices for greater diversity and accommodation for individual students’ needs.
If all the kids with exceptionalites are pulled out of public schooling, who will advocate within the school system for kids with exceptionalities?
Public education is the product of an ongoing society-wide negotiation regarding the values, standards, and cultural content we want the next generation to share. While it behooves everyone to take an active interest in this negotiation, the truth is that the most engaged participants are those who have a direct stake in the system (and that’s entirely understandable).
Longer Zingerella here.
All that (including the linked post) being said, I’m not sure what I would choose to do if it were my child being bullied or quashed or otherwise made miserable in public school. Do I want that negotiation to take place over my kid’s emotional landscape? I don’t know.
* I think, however, that some parents use homeschooling and private schooling as a way to exercise control over their kids’ access to information and choice, and I’m really quite opposed to that.
Zingerella-
The thing with that view is a little bit two-fold. 1) That might work in the long term, but in the short term, it’s still a crappy school. 2) No one ever seems grateful, or even begrudingly acknowledges that things are better, because of the people who are always pushing the administration and teachers. Not the administration, not the teachers, not the students. So, honestly, I think it’s probably best that if I want something much higher for my children, I should not bug everyone else.
Of course, I’ll still be paying my taxes and voting on the school board members, so there’s that much. In fact, I’m probably doing the school a good thing, because I’d be paying taxes, but my kids wouldn’t be sucking up other students resources.
(I’m assuming that you don’t think I’m pulling my kids out because I want to dictate their information flow).
Of course I don’t think you’re pulling your kids because you want to constrain their access to information. I just don’t feel comfortable making blanket statements that all parents should have the right to educate their children in whatever way the parents see fit. (And I’m not sure where to draw the lines, either, but that’s a subject for my own blog.)
And while I think that voting on school board members provides members of the public with some control over public education, most people who don’t have kids in school don’t see how the results of those elections play out in the classroom quite the same way.
I also think you underestimate how much teachers value engaged parents. I think there’s a lot of defensiveness on the part of teachers and the administration, because what parents want is often difficult to arrange, or impossible to arrange. Or because they, as teachers and administrators, have to negotiate the conflicting demands of different groups of parents, which is pretty thankless (I’m an advocate of open, information-based sexuality education in the classroom for students starting from a very early age. Another parent might feel that their child’s innocence was being damaged by my approach to talking about sex. Pity the teacher who gets between me and that parent.) But I know that without parents saying “hey, what about my kid?” (“Why are the class for my developmentally delayed kid and the after-school program not in the same school, and how am I supposed to get him from one to the other in the middle of the day?” “Why are there no stories with black protagonists in this English curriculum?” “Why are there no images of women doing science in this science book?” “Why are we serving packaged cookies as snacks to our kindergarten class, when we could be serving fruit?” etc.) those kids are more likely to fall between the cracks in the system.
And I don’t think the engaged parents do it for the kudos from teachers or administration. They do it so that their kids’ needs are met. Gratitude would be nice, but it’s hardly the point.
Again, I’m not saying that your kids deserve to be the ones over whom this societal negotiation is taking place. Or that you should do anything other than what you are planning to do. Far be it for me to constrain your family’s access to choice, or to tell anyone else what to do. If I manage to have a kid of my own, I’m not sure whether my own socialistic principles will stand up to reality, and I’m certainly not going to place my adherence to my principles over my kid’s needs. So I may be a big hypocrite (god knows, I loved supply teaching at the girl-focused private school here in town, and would love for any daughter of mine to be able to have that kind of education. Of course, said school costs more per year than I pay for housing, so even if I have a daughter, I won’t be able to afford it, and will have to make do with being a terror to my hypothetical kid’s hypothetical public school teachers). But I do worry about the kids who get left behind and about what happens to one of society’s best available tools for making sure that every kid has better tools, when the smart, committed people who have the time to spare and the tools to actually cause change withdraw from the system.
[...] have been the subject, direct or tangential, of a number of posts lately. Most notably this fantastic, honest piece about Antigone’s school experience. Government schooling is an emotionally charged subject since most of us attended school every [...]
That sounds just like me in elementary school. My parents decided to homeschool my sisters and I after I “graduated” from 6th grade. I was much happier afterwards.
My mom encountered opposition from the family, who were sure that she would ruin us – we turned out just fine, thank you. I graduated from high school early, my sisters and I detest texting and Twilight, and we’re not socially retarded.
Homeschooling is the nation’s choice for education, it seems, growing at a rate of 10 to 20% per year (Education Off the Grid, Kimberly Yuracko), and after starting with an estimated 1 million homeschooling in 2000, it has now grown to an estimated 3 million (Homeschooling: The Sleeping Giant of American Education, Dan Lips and Evan Feinberg).
All statistics that you can find on homeschooling are positive, including these two zingers:
-saves tax payers nearly 10 billion per year (Homeschooling: The Sleeping Giant of American Education, Dan Lips and Evan Feinberg)
-almost 75% of homeschoolers 18-24 attended college and/or completed a bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, or professional degree (New Followers of an Old Path, Susie Aasen)
If you are interested in learning more about homeschooling (and potential legal issues here and abroad), be sure to check out the HSLDA, and their case archives. Some of the things happening to homeschoolers in other countries – namely Germany and Sweden – are horrific, and should be an example for us if we let to government go to far in regulations.
K12 education is the best. Everyone should look out for it.,,*