Is it necessary to go to school to experience real life?

Answer

Hi Steve,

I do like to think my morals are fairly solid, and yes, I wasn't homeschooled. But I didn't learn my morals from public school. I learned them from my parents and living my life.

I suppose that the latter, living my life, was critically dependent on having normal human interactions. That's how life lessons are learned. So I do think that social interaction is very important.

I've known homeschoolers who are terrific at providing their kids opportunities for diverse social interaction. As a result, the homeschooled kids I've known were remarkably mature and capable of dealing with adults and all sorts of people in diverse situations. In my opinion, they had a better sense of "real life" than kids who are sheltered in classrooms entirely with peers their own age.

Those are my random opinions. Don't take them to be worth too much. I'm not a parent yet and I wasn't homeschooled. Perhaps others can pipe in.

Chris

Answer

Steve,

In your "real world," if you don't like something or can't deal with it, you can walk away. School kids can't do that. All they know is that whatever they got yesterday may be worse tomorrow.

About the Christian thing, Christians are just regular people. Churches are for sinners not saints ...

My kids are involved in the youth group at our church and they both love it. They have friends and more than enough interaction with the activities there.

I can assure you, with no doubt, that the kids there can be just as bad as the ones who are not. The difference is that at church they are trying to teach them the way to be better.

Raising kids is hard, and where you are it's going to get harder. The good news is that it does get easier, but only if you do the hard part when you have to.

Good luck to you and don't let your kid(s) down. Only you can decide what is right for you and your family, but I hope you found some of this a little helpful.

Answer

Hi Steve,

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Is it necessary to go to school to experience real life?

Well, as a homeschooled person and mother of homeschoolers (who have attended school at times but no longer do) I can say that homeschooling your daughter is more of the "real life" than school could ever provide.

In school they are separated into classes of children their own age, however my kids are now able to mix with people of all ages, and at home they're around their parents and family doing real life work and learning skills (even if you don't think they are)- all this better equips them to cope with real life, in my opinion.

My morals and my values I gained from my parents and have further developed or cemented over my adult life. Morals and values are sorely missing from public schools.

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Do I put her in a public school for the interaction and activities we had, or isolate her with only Christians until college? Please help!

Are you able to involve her in some clubs or activities (dancing, gymnastics, sport etc), attend some homeschool support meetings if available, and the like?

If SHE feels isolated or if you feel a need to have a break, then perhaps try school for a while.

All the best, Kate

Answer

Let me turn your question back on you: What is real life?

You're an adult. Does your day consist of being segregated into groups of people all your same age, simply because they're the same age? Where everyone does the same thing, sits down, shuts up, and listens to an authority figure all day? (Okay, yes, there are jobs out there like that latter, but a huge number are not). Does your day consist of being a social outcast and pariah, or looked up to by all your peers for no reason better than 'being popular'? Are bullies allowed to continually harrass you, and you have no recourse, legal or otherwise?

Is this what real life is like to you? Is this what your daughter's experience in school would be like?

See...I think it's a mistake to isolate children to "only Christians" or only anything else. Society isn't *like* that. Real life isn't *like* that (unless an adult chooses to so isolate him or herself - and I did that for several years personally. My choice; I paid for it later.) But you hardly need to send her to a public school to create all sorts of interactions. There are community sports teams, dance classes, music classes, YMCA, 4-H, FFA, Roleplaying games...

If your daughter wishes to go, and you think she would do well there, well, why *not* send her for a term, and see how she feels? It's not like you can't take her back out again if it turns out to be a bad thing for her. But if she doesn't want to go, I don't see what's to be accomplished by forcing her. (Nor, by the way, do I understand parents who homeschool kids against their will, when public school is a viable alternative. That's not a good situation for making anybody want to learn.)

As for myself, certainly I went to public schools, and I did exceedingly well, scholastically. But I did not learn to study (didn't need to, wasn't challenged, had a real struggle in college). I did not do well socially: at no point in my schooling years did I have more than 1 really close friend. I didn't know how to talk to people, and at my 10 year HS reunion I *still* didn't know how to talk to those people!) I was not athletically skilled, and was ridiculed in gym. I was ridiculed for being smart. Oh yeah, public school was such a joy. Not. I spent most of my HS years either tramping through the woods after school, or at my job. I did not socialise outside of school. I wasn't asked to socialise by my peers. I wasn't one of the popular people. Would I have been better off if my parents had homeschooled me? I have no idea. But I can't see how I'd have been worse. At least I'd have avoided being harrassed for being too smart. Nor, by the way, did I date in HS. I was a social misfit. I still *am* at 37. Public schooling didn't change that, and it didn't teach me how to be different. All it could do was continually force me into painful situations I could not change, and could not avoid.

As for my morals, I don't remember being taught them in school. And they have grown, changed, developed steadily over the years. I'm not the same person I was at 27, let alone at 17. This is a response to interacting in the real world, with real situations, real people, real problems. (And as a final note, when I was in my first year at university, I stated many times that college was either the most real, or the most unreal, thing in the world: a life that consisted of going to class, studying, hanging out with a bunch of young people my age, partying... I have since decided that it was essentially unreal. Real life for me now is simple domesticity, being a stay-home mom for 4 kids. I don't get to read much, let alone study, I don't have access to any number of people available to schmooze at any out of the day or night - heck, I can hardly organize a visit to a friend's house without an act of God and 2 weeks notice), and life is very mundane. Good, but mundane. This is Real Life. I don't see how the institutional concept can prepare people for it. It may not *prevent* them, but that's different from *preparing* them.

Answer

Homeschooled students certainly can experience "real life" I was homeschooled all my school years (I am at hampshire college now) and I managed to live more real life than any public schoolers I know. I sailed the atlantic, explored the great lakes by ship and by hitchhiking, had my own apartment in puerto rico, spent some time as street painter, eddited my own newspaper collumn, dealt with up to 6000 visitors a day at a maritime museum where I worked, spent countless houres slogging through backwoods and streams for a watershed quality survey group, did the same for a herpetological atlas project, worked on building a house, backpacked through south-american rainforests, learned to sail the last great square rigged ships, and studied set design with a respected broadway designer. I did all these with under a thousand dollars a year before I graduated highschool, if these things don't constutute real life, I don't know what does.

Some comments from a distant country

I attended school in the usual way from age 5-18 in England. It was at school that I learned to become 'streetwise' (in a benign sense) and to recognize trouble before it hit me. In school I learned to stand up to bullies and to deal with some arrogant and pretentious classmates and with the occasional crazy teacher and so forth. At my secondary school I also learned to 'swim against the tide', to have the courage to stand up in front of 30 other boys and say things that none of them wanted to hear. These are valuable qualities that can't easily be learnt in a harmonious home.

Another, very different advantage of school (for me) was that I had the good fortune to be with an outstandingly able and highly stimulating peer group.

From a distance of some thousands of miles, I have a feeling that some homeschooled kids lead rather sheltered lives. (In the U.K. homeschooing is very rare indeed).

Joncey

P.S. There are some European countries that don't offer the option of homeschooling, as attending school and mixing with other kids from a cross-section of backgrounds is seen a duty akin to compulsory military service. I imagine many American homeschoolers will find this very shocking.

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