This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
This morning a homeschooling friend of mine sent me a link to this unintentionally hilarious New York Times piece, inviting teenagers to share their opinion of homeschooling and whether it prepares children for the "real world." The comments that follow are what I find hilarious, but also quite sad. In the upside-down view of most of the teenagers, the "real world," is the highly regulated, compartmentalized realm of the government educational system, where children spend 13 years almost exclusively with same-age peers, receiving institutionalized (and often politicized) instruction from government employees.
The Pundit and Pundette blog shares some of the more pathetic comments (complete with misspellings, bad syntax, and grammatical errors), and then summarizes the more common views:
The themes:
- School is where our friends are (bullies included) and its institutional character prepares us for the grim "real world."
- Home is an isolating, lonely place.
- Friends are vastly more important than family.
- "Socialization" is a necessity and can only take place in school.
- "Socialization" is more important than learning.
- Conformity is more important than learning.
- Learning shouldn't be too pleasant an experience.
- Herding us into groups is what we deserve.
- Outside the institution of government school, personal advancement is not possible.
Here we have young people who can barely imagine what life would be like without school, or how they could possibly learn or make friends apart from this government institution. Their obsession with "socialization" attests to the breadth and depth of the peer-attachment epidemic.
I'm not sure what the poor things mean by "the real world," but I get the feeling they think it's going to be even bleaker than the current conveyor belt they're riding. Passivity and conformity have been bred into them from day one and all they can do is praise the system that is crushing them. It's not their fault; they never had a chance.
Whatever your view of homeschooling, I suspect the New York Times editors did not intend to showcase the problems with government schooling so profoundly and irrefutably.
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Further thoughts: So what's the solution? Obviously not everyone can or should homeschool. And private schooling is not an option for those on tight budgets (which is nearly everyone).
The problems with our once-proud public education system are too numerous to mention, but surely increased bureaucratization is chief of sins, along with the entrenchment of that bureaucracy. As with so many of our government institutions, it seems to have become a system that continues unchanged because there's graft to be had. And as with so many of our government institutions, it seems the only solution is to tear it down to the ground, and rebuild it on a brand new model.
It's easy to criticize, but let's dream big here, Ricocheteers. What would your proposed model for public education (under the assumption that some form of public education is a Good Thing™) look like?
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Dec '10
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
My model would look a lot like it did before Dewey and other intelligent idiots got a hold of our systems. First and foremost is getting back to the basics. School (like any government institution) must have a rigidly set and very limited purpose. Second (and still like any government institution) school must be an organ of those who actually use it. Local, local, local. I theorize (on absolutely no evidence) that parental involvement has decreased in direct proportion to non-local government interference. Why should the parents bother to govern their school systems when it they our being governed from on high? That's my $0.02.
Aug '11
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
The King Prawn:
School (like any government institution) must have a rigidly set and very limited purpose. Second (and still like any government institution) school must be an organ of those who actually use it. Local, local, local.
To the first, I completely agree. Schools are increasingly becoming a clearinghouse for community services. While I understand the thinking: that this is an efficient way to connect needy families with services to help them, I am naturally concerned about costs and limited resources that I feel should be used mainly for education. I was a bit shocked to learn that some schools are now offering after-school supper through a federal program that you and I are paying for. Lunch, I can understand. Breakfast, which schools have been offering for quite some time, seems unnecessary. (Eat at home, kids!) But when it comes to Suppers at school, I am completely heartless. Go home! Eat at home!
Schools aren't just the replacement for community services, they are also increasingly acting in loco parentis, to the point where I wonder when we'll just be expected to ship our kids off to live at school full time from age 5 on up.
Edited on November 16, 2011 at 9:15pmDec '10
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
DrewInWisconsin
I wonder when we'll just be expected to ship our kids off to live at school full time from age 5 on up. · Nov 16 at 9:28am
I was advocating just such a thing for my 12 year old the other day, but that was probably a behavioral thing. What part of "don't be a jerk about loading the dishwasher and we'll make this pumpkin bread together as soon as you're done" means develop an attitude and accuse me of picking the other child as my favorite?
Aug '11
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
To the comments at the New York Times, I found this one particularly troubling:
If I may summarize: "If you end up smarter than everyone, you'll just be friendless and frustrated, because knowledge is finite and eventually you'll run out of things to learn, anyway. Stay dumb and have friends."
Dec '10
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
DrewInWisconsin: To the comments at the New York Times, I found this one particularly troubling:
If I may summarize: "If you end up smarter than everyone, you'll just be friendless and frustrated, because knowledge is finite and eventually you'll run out of things to learn, anyway. Stay dumb and have friends."
Missed in that understanding is that many homeschooling families are also active in their churches. I'd rather my kids pick their friends from the youth group anyway.
Feb '11
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
As I read the first page of comments at the Times blog site, my fingers were itching for their red pen. I skipped ahead to the later pages, where seemingly all homeschoolers had posted. The difference in the quality of the comments between the children in public school and the homeschoolers was . . . awesome.
Nov '10
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
If home-schooled kids can't make friends, it's because they are weird in some (negative) way. If they went to public school, they would still be weird. I have observed this first-hand, even in my own family.
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
Love the title of this post, Drew, because it reminds me about how folks (extended family members included) used to condescend to me for attending a private Christian school. "Boy are you in for a shock when you finish school and enter the real world," they'd claim.
I'm almost disappointed to never have encountered that "real world shock" I was promised.
Aug '11
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
Heh. Thanks, Diane. I think I lost focus while I was writing (I got interrupted about five times), and so the more I think about this New York Times piece and the comments, the more I wonder what sort of messages young people are absorbing about the value of education. Our current model for public education is so well established that describing the benefits of a different model is, as one of the Pundit/Pundette duo wrote, "like trying to describe daylight to the blind."
And then I consider that the education establishment is just one of dozens of established bureaucracies that desperately needs reform, and fixing the problems in Washington seems insurmountable.
Sep '10
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
Awesome.
In my experience, average students are always eager to befriend smart kids. Who wants a study partner that is dumber than yourself?
Feb '10
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
Home schooled and never missed a thing. Actually, I got to do so many things I would never have been able to do in school. Talk about the real world?!? I got it in spades.
Sep '10
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
Dreaming big, I think the only way to fix this mess is to treat this as an addiction and take appropriate cold turkey actions.
First, if I could get on the local school board with like-minded adults, the first thing we would do is demand that certain contract provisions be negated: tenure, various work rules, etc. As part of this first step, I would seek to fire all of the counselors, advisors, administrators and others who when it gets down to brass tacks, teach nobody anything.
I would then review the curriculum and jettison anything that didn't teach the basics necessary for functional adulthood such as math, balanced history, reading and writing, basic sciences and the classical arts, and of course all union work rules.
Then, when the teachers strike, I would lock them out by offering jobs to any reasonably qualified adults, who could survive a background check and who accepted the new curriculum and professional standards of excellence. Former teachers willing to cross the picket line would be welcome in our schools.
Then we would get around to implementing the best in educational practices to lift every child up to new expectations of learning excellence.
Oct '10
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
I reject the assumption; public education is pernicious and will inevitably be captured to indoctrinate children to serve the ends of the state.
Instead, we should have a competitive market of credential issuers who provide standardised tests and certify scores on them. Ideally, these would be finely-grained tests, so a candidate for admission to university would have a panel of scores in English, mathematics, history, physics, Latin, biology, etc. The market among issuers would be like credit rating agencies—those known to be more reliable would be more highly weighted by admissions committees and command higher fees by parents aspiring their children's attending élite institutions.
Those wishing to become auto mechanics, hairdressers, or other productive occupations would be similarly certified and enabled to embark upon their careers without further education or licensing by the state.
What is the role of the state in all of this? Dang—none that I can think of.
Nov '10
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
Pooling our money into public dollars to educate our children and that monstrosity called the "public school system" are not synonymous. I am fully in favor of the former, and opposed to the latter. The public school system is only one way to educate our children with public dollars, and an inefficient, monopoly at that. I advocate a voucher system where the dollars follow the child, are controlled by the parent, and can be used at any school the parents choose. Introduce true, unfettered competition, and let the market figure it out. If parents want to send their children to "progressive" schools that teach them what to think, every little politically correct myth that leaves them wholly unprepared for this much-talked-about "real world", go ahead, and good luck with that. Conversely, if they want to send them to a school that teaches them how to think with a classical liberal education, all the better. How many schools would pop up to teach this classical curriculum?
That said, I do have to admit my kids go to a pretty good public school, but my wife is on the PTA & we researched schools extensively before moving to this area.
Aug '11
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
Is NCLB part of the problem or part of the solution? In an Op-Ed in yesterday’s WSJ, Kevin Chavous, Chairman of the Black Alliance for Educational Option, claimed that the teachers’ unions and the Tea Party were allied in blocking the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The Tea Party object on Constitutional grounds and, according to Chavous, the teachers’ unions is simply opposed to teacher evaluation.
Conservatives like Diane Ravitch, have consistently support a more muscular NCLB that would actually enforce national content-based standards, but are the NCLB curricular standards enforceable? Are they content-based? On first reading, Duncan’s new core standards seem to simply perpetuate the pedagogical weaknesses of the current system. My state, Oregon, continues to load down the K-12 curriculum with requirements irrelevant and even inimical to the teaching of a solid core curriculum.
To what extent has NCLB been successful? In the states and cities where we have seen genuine progress with charter schools like KIPP and Harlam Success Academy, was that progress facilitated by NCLB? If it was, can that charter school movement continue without NCLB or, in the absence of NCLB, will the unions kill those schools?
Mar '11
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
I will not sugar code this;
I have 6 homeschoolled children and they are more socially adept by far than other children their ages who went to the institutions we call school today. My family are all teachers and my wife's family are all physicians, both sides worried about me when we started but now are completely on board with what we have done. I never give an inch on the socialization argument, the "real world" is easier to navigate when you can talk to adults not juveniles.
Apr '11
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
Diane Ellis, Ed.: Love the title of this post, Drew, because it reminds me about how folks (extended family members included) used to condescend to me for attending a private Christian school. "Boy are you in for a shock when you finish school and enter the real world," they'd claim.
I'm almost disappointed to never have encountered that "real world shock" I was promised. ·
The kids I knew at Regents, where I spent a week on a summer course as one of the few non-locals, were way smarter than the kids I studied alongside at Boalt. Much though I love US history, and it's what I spend most of my reading time studying, I'm simply never going to have my federalist papers down like they did. That said, conversations about gay rights and such did have a kind of abstract air to them.
I don't think that the bubble is a big problem for many of them, but I do think that it can be real. If, come the time, my kids are able and willing to go, I'd be ecstatic for them to start enjoying Pat Robertson's kids tolerance for Orthodoxy.
May '10
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
The govenment schools are an irredeemable and irremediable mess.
Vouchers are the only solution. Students whose parents give a damn will be much better off, and students whose parents can't, won't or don't move them out at least won't be any worse off.
Oct '11
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
I was home schooled through eighth grade and then went to public high school. Adjusting to public school was a shock. High school was hardly the real world, though. The bigger shock was after I left college and began paying taxes. That, my friends, is the real world.
Feb '11
Re: This “real world” you’re talking about? I don't think it means what you think it means.
Working with undergraduate students at a local University, I've seen three general types of home schooled students:
Type 1. Adjusts easily, excellent social skills, smokes the competition (ie those from a public school background, etc.) this is easily the vast majority of home schooled students I've met.
Type 2. Does not adjust well, is angry and frustrated, often has a minor melt-down and retreats to the family, either by dropping out of school or changing Universities. They manufacture excuses for poor attendance, poor attitudes toward peers, poor grades, etc. they view others students as inherently inferior, or they stick it out and seem to develop emotional problems, (a tiny, tiny minority of the homeschool students I've met). It seems that many of these problems are related to the family that provided the home schooling, not home schooling.
Type 3. Has some difficulty adjusting, but does so over time, they are mediocre to stellar students, yet they too soon build relationships, etc. Often this type is surprised to no longer be the only smart person present, or is shocked that people have such differing values; they are also in the minority of home schoolers I've known.