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Homeschooling and ‘Socialization’
My kids starting homeschooling 30 years ago, when homeschooling really wasn’t much of a thing. A question commonly asked back then, and probably still today, was “how will they be socialized?”
In fact, they all came out pretty well, at least in that regard. (Decades of having me as a dad has left some of them with an … unconventional … sense of humor, but that’s another story.)
I wonder how many of those who fretted about the socialization of homeschooled children — indeed, who worried about every aspect of homeschooling — are similarly concerned about the current government-and-teachers’-union-inspired catastrophe of scores of millions of unschooled children trapped in an unnecessary and counter-productive lockdown.
Published in Education
Without question. I’ve observed for years, as I drive through residential neighborhoods, how few children are outside anymore. Local high schools struggle to interest enough children in sports to field basketball, soccer, and even football teams.
Screens.
Screens are the Big Macs — no, the popcorn shrimp — of entertainment: quick hits of salt and fat, no investment, no reward, but transient easy satisfaction.
I think we will look back someday on the screen revolution and realize that, like women in the workplace, like The Pill, like the automobile, it was an irreversible and socially transformative technology in ways we didn’t anticipate.
Depends on the neighborhood, I suppose. Ours used to have wandering packs of kids moving from yard to yard. Helped that the kids next door were roughly the same age as ours. Plus some more farther down the block. Now that all these kids are teenagers, there’s not as much of that. But even if they’re doing that blasted screen-time stuff, they’re still likely to be in the backyard.
~waits for a Ricochet editor to tell us to stop posting and go outside.
Does that mean I get to leave this meeting?
No kidding. See my post on RPGs (just up now).
One thing that struck me when I started doing long-distance bicycle rides through Amish neighborhoods in 1996 was the sound of children playing outside. It made me realize that it was a long time since I had heard that. On weekends it might be more of an intergenerational group playing ball, and even during the week a young mother might be “playing” with her kids. One time a young mother was driving a horse-drawn, rubber-wheeled wagon full of children to who knows where, maybe to a play date, and seemed to be having as good a time as the kids. Reminded me of my own mother.
“By the authority vested in me….”
There have been a few reports of trans-students “de-transitioning” because of the lockdowns. Since it seems a lot of it is from peer pressure, some who haven’t been to school have decided that they really aren’t the opposite sex. One anecdote I heard was a school had six female students who had said that they were males. At least two had now decided that they weren’t and a few others were wavering.