Many lies are told about the benefits of homeschooling, but one of the most common is that homeschooled kids aren't socialized the same way as public school kids. If public school is supposed to be the good socializer, one wonders why it s done such a poor job of it.
00:00:25.320What a child needs most of all is not tutoring from experts in every academic discipline.
00:00:30.320He's not going to receive that in public school anyway.
00:00:32.100But a personalized educational experience tailored to his own unique needs.
00:00:36.100Nobody's better equipped to provide that than his parents.
00:00:38.940But by far, the biggest lie about homeschooling, and also the most common argument made against it, is that homeschool kids aren't properly socialized.
00:00:48.340This line is especially ironic now as public school kids have been trapped in their homes behind computers for a year.
00:00:53.800But putting the lockdowns aside, the claim that homeschooled kids won't develop the excellent social skills of public school children is absurd for a number of reasons.
00:01:01.240The first being that public school kids don't have excellent social skills or any social skills at all.
00:01:06.560To the people who make this claim, I want to ask, have you spent any time, you know, in society?
00:01:12.420Maybe you've noticed that though we are a society mostly populated by people who spent their formative years in public school, we are also a society plagued by crippling anxiety, neuroses, ample insecurities, all sorts of antisocial behavior.
00:01:26.840If public school is supposed to be the good socializer, one wonders why it's done such a poor job of it.
00:01:32.980In the schools themselves, we're told that bullying is an epidemic.
00:01:36.260We know that drug and alcohol abuse are major problems.
00:01:38.700Childhood suicide was on the rise even before the lockdowns accelerated the trend.
00:01:43.660Sure, you may have met an awkward homeschool kid in youth group when you were in seventh grade.
00:01:47.980But if you can draw sweeping conclusions based on that anecdotal evidence, what kind of conclusions should we draw about public school based on quite a bit more evidence?
00:01:57.260It seems that experience and evidence points to public school, not homeschool, being the environment that really stunts the development of social skills.
00:02:19.180He has teachers, of course, but the teachers are vastly outnumbered by the students.
00:02:22.900The child in public school learns how to act, what to say, what to believe, largely by mimicking the other kids in the school.
00:02:29.700His social success, and therefore, from his perspective, his happiness, depends on his ability to fit in with, blend in with, imitate the other kids.
00:02:39.440But the problem is that the other kids are just as confused and lost as he is.
00:03:10.860Well, in homeschool, the child spends most of his time around his parents and his siblings.
00:03:14.480There is a much better chance in this environment that he picks up his social cues from his parents and he looks to them for guidance, affirmation, approval.
00:03:24.160If a homeschool child seems weird to you, it's probably because they're more mature, more socially advanced than the typical child.
00:03:32.620They've learned how to act, how to conduct themselves by imitating adults.
00:03:36.580That may make it more difficult for them to fit in with some of their more immature peers, but in the long run, the benefits are clear.
00:03:44.980And it's not like homeschool kids, pandemic notwithstanding, never spend any time around other kids.
00:03:49.280It's just that they don't spend all of their time around other kids.