After my creationism / evolution post, I got to thinking about my homeschooled education, and how it shaped who I am as a person. As I've mentioned quite a few times before, I was homeschooled for most of my school-able life - with the notable exception of one year at a private Christian school. A typical day would generally go thusly: after getting up and having breakfast, me and my sister would read a Christian-published current events publication, and then begin the actual bookwork part of our day. We would both sit at the kitchen table, pencils in hand, and work through books of Christian-oriented spelling, math, social studies, English, etc. This would usually continue until five or six at night. Almost everything we did, we did with mom - grocery shopping, errands to various places, etc.

As one might imagine, the same three people spending day after day together is not very conducive to creating a well-balanced social life, and one would be correct. The stereotypical view of a homeschooled family was exactly the sort of people we hung around with - kids who lived on farms, learned to drive tractors when they were ten, and took breaks to bring livestock in from the field. These were kids who joined 4H, and raised prize pigs to show at the county fair. (To be perfectly honest, the "homeschooled Christian family" stereotype prevalent among many of my non-homeschooled peers is fairly inaccurate. Homeschooled families run the socio-political gamut from rural and conservative to suburbanite and liberal and everything in between and vice-versa and etc. Do not send me hate mail.)

This is not to say that I didn't enjoy our time spent with other homeschooled children and their families (One of my best friends at the time, Nathan Thomas, was homeschooled.) just that homeschoolers don't represent a very broad slice of American society.

Church didn't help much, either.

In spite of the fact that I spent the majority of my days with the same two people (Or perhaps because of it) I was a rather shy kid who didn't make friends easily. In fact, I didn't make friends at all. I was never able to make friends at church - instead, I ended up hating most of the other children my age because I got constantly teased about my height. (I was scrawny, for lack of a better word - underweight and under-tall for my age.) I had no idea how to take teasing - I would lash out at them, which they thought was funny, and it only made them tease me more. Over time, the teasing got more aggressive - one of my tormentors, a kid named Tyler, once even pushed me against a wall and spat on my face. I eventually just started to avoid my peers altogether - especially after my one best friend / protector John left. By a stroke of luck, I was asked to help in the nursery on Wednesday nights, and I ran lights in what basically amounted to the old-people service every other Wednesday. Sundays, when I couldn't avoid class by wandering around the church, I kept to myself in the back and left as soon as I could.

My parents weren't really a big help with any of this - they meant well, but their standard advice for dealing with the teasing was "ignore it, and it'll stop". This is a very adult way of dealing with a kid's problem. Adults view the act of ignoring somebody as an act of power; to children, it spells "Weakness" with a capitol "W". A more effective, though slightly antisocial answer to this problem would have been to punch the offenders in the face. (I stress that this solution should be used sparingly, but it can be surprisingly effective when used at the right time - I'll probably talk about this in a later article.)

Things got a little better when we left that church, though by that time I was so convinced that everybody my age was a cruel, horrible person that I refused to associate with any of the kids at the new church. Nothing improved significantly until the year that I went to the private Christian school. It was a major culture shock for me, and one that was badly needed. All of a sudden, I was surrounded by peers that I had to learn to get along with. ICA turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life. I regret that I was only able to attend one year. It was slow going, but eventually I became sociable, learned to have fun with other people, and made lasting friendships. And therein lies the point of what I'm trying to say - children need interaction with peers to develop properly - interaction that homeschooling does not readily provide.

Homeschoolers get in a major fuss about this issue. (1)(2)(3) However, the simple fact remains that homeschooled kids will interact with their peers less than children who attend a larger class with other children. I'm not necessarily against this - a lot of homeschooled kids I've met are far more polite than their public-schooled counterparts. But one needs to be especially careful when homeschooling to replace the lost peer interaction with something else - and preferably, the replacement should not always be other homeschooled kids. Part of growing up is learning how to get along with people who have completely different ideas than you, and it's very easy to block all points of view except your own when homeschooling.

I am not arguing against homeschooling by any means - part of my "uniqueness" comes from those years, and I wouldn't want to change that. I am, however, arguing that if one chooses to homeschool, it should be done with care - don't let homeschooling become your life. Get out and meet new people, make sure your children hear opposing viewpoints from the things you teach them, and encourage them to make friends with other people. And I am not blaming my complete lack of social skills in my early life on my homeschooling - I was naturally shy with the kids from church even before I started homeschooling, and had a tendency to hold grudges months, even years past when I had been originally hurt. Did homeschooling make me even more shy and introverted? No. Did it shield me from situations where I might have had to learn to deal with things without reverting to running away and hiding?

I look at the progress that I made in one year at Iowa Christian Academy, and think "Absolutely".

Exit, stage left. Sparks

1: http://learninfreedom.org/socialization.html 2: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/zysk1.html 3: Annoyingly long URL