Timothy C. May wrote:
At 4:31 AM 9/23/96, Lucky Green wrote:
On Sun, 22 Sep 1996, snow wrote:
I would agree that parents can do as good or better at _most_ subjects thru about the 3rd or 4th grade, and I do agree that most of todays schools are shit, however there is one area-- social skills--that homeschooling simply can't compete.
Proponents of mass public education love to trot that one out, probably because it sounds good and appeals to common sense. However, I sincerely doubt it's true in any way. For example, I'd like to see some actual comparison of the social skills (and, umm, how do you measure that anyway? I don't remember taking any social skills tests in school to make sure I was acquiring that valuable stuff) of public school victims and homeschooled people. If it's such a problem, where are all those social freaks who got that way due to homeschooling? Before the Industrial Revolution, homeschooling was of course quite common. Many "public schools" were simply cheap boarding houses for lower-middle class children (see Nicholas Nickelby for a colorful example). Those with the means hired tutors.
Children need to learn how to interact with one another in groups larger than a family unit. I don't think that homeschooling can accomplish this nearly as well as the public (or private) schools could.
Please note that homeschooling does not imply that parents isolate their children from contact with the world until they're at voting age. Also, note that the public elementary schools I attended seemed hell-bent on *preventing* any sort of interaction with a group of peers. I don't recall being encouraged to do much but shut up and perform the uninspired textbook assignments I was given. ______c_________________________________________________________________ Mike M Nally * IBM % Tivoli * Austin TX * How quickly we forget that mailto:m5@tivoli.com mailto:m101@io.com * "deer processing" and "data http://www.io.com/~m101/ * processing" are different!