Unsocial behavior among teens is becoming more and more of a problem. Many high school graduates do not know how to communicate with adults, handicapping them in their jobs and their lives. I believe the public school system is the prime cause of this problem. It creates an environment that is counter-productive to true socialization. Many opponents of homeschooling (the National Education Association in particular) cite the lack of socialization as a key disadvantage of learning at home. They believe that institutionalizing children – forcing them to socialize only with other children of the same age and usually the same general socio-economic background, often further dividing them by gender (as in boys’ line and girls’ line, boys against girls, boys’ sports and girls’ sports, etc.), and being dictated to by adults who are seen, not as social peers, but as authoritative figures – is conducive to true social behavior. Publicly schooled children in general are not social, they are socialized; the difference being in the quality of the social connections they are permitted to make. Outside of public school, people are free to associate with other people of all ages, genders, races, and socio-economic backgrounds. In this way, a person learns to be social with all types of people. Homeschooled children are consistently more social with adults and more accepting of gender and race differences than their publicly schooled counterparts because of this freedom to associate with a wide variety of people. A study by the Fraser Institute, an independent public policy organization, found that the typical homeschooled child is more mature, friendly, happy, thoughtful, competent, less peer dependent, better socialized, and exhibits "significantly higher" self-esteem than students in public or private schools. ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center of the U.S. government, which has published multiple articles on homeschooling, reports that
“insofar as self concept is a reflector of socialization, ... there may be sufficient evidence to indicate that some home-schooled children have a higher self concept than conventionally schooled children.”
This doesn’t mean that the only way to improve social behavior in our children is to homeschool them. A new system of public schooling can be created to implement this. To be effective in encouraging social behavior in children, a public school system must allow for the freedom to associate with people of all ages, separation by gender needs to be eliminated (except, obviously, in bathrooms), and teachers and administrators need to be mentors and advocates, someone a child can trust and relate to, not someone to be subjugated to.
To read more from Stop Beating the Dead Horse, visit www.stopbeatingthedeadhorse.com.
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