The Matt Walsh Show - March 13, 2021


The Biggest Lie About Homeschooling

Topics
socialization in homeschool vs. public school
Hosted by
Matt Walsh
Ep. 677 - Biden Performs Social Experiments On The Military Ep. 678 - Military Attacks Journalist. 'Anti-Fascist' Crowd Cheers.

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

182.74

Word count

725

Sentence count

45


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 If public school is supposed to be the good socializer, one wonders why it's done such a poor job of it.
00:00:08.420 Many lies are told by those who want to stop you from making the choice to educate your own children.
00:00:13.500 They'll say, for example, that homeschool kids don't perform as well academically as public school kids.
00:00:18.540 Well, research has consistently shown that to be a lie.
00:00:20.740 They'll say that parents aren't as qualified to teach their own children.
00:00:24.180 That's clearly untrue.
00:00:25.320 What a child needs most of all is not tutoring from experts in every academic discipline.
00:00:30.320 He's not going to receive that in public school anyway.
00:00:32.100 But a personalized educational experience tailored to his own unique needs.
00:00:36.100 Nobody's better equipped to provide that than his parents.
00:00:38.940 But by far, the biggest lie about homeschooling, and also the most common argument made against it, is that homeschool kids aren't properly socialized.
00:00:48.340 This line is especially ironic now as public school kids have been trapped in their homes behind computers for a year.
00:00:53.800 But 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.
00:01:01.240 The first being that public school kids don't have excellent social skills or any social skills at all.
00:01:06.560 To the people who make this claim, I want to ask, have you spent any time, you know, in society?
00:01:12.420 Maybe 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.
00:01:26.840 If public school is supposed to be the good socializer, one wonders why it's done such a poor job of it.
00:01:32.980 In the schools themselves, we're told that bullying is an epidemic.
00:01:36.260 We know that drug and alcohol abuse are major problems.
00:01:38.700 Childhood suicide was on the rise even before the lockdowns accelerated the trend.
00:01:43.660 Sure, you may have met an awkward homeschool kid in youth group when you were in seventh grade.
00:01:47.980 But 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?
00:01:57.260 It seems that experience and evidence points to public school, not homeschool, being the environment that really stunts the development of social skills.
00:02:06.040 Why is that?
00:02:06.740 Well, it's all about social cues.
00:02:09.600 In public school, where is the child getting his social cues?
00:02:13.340 From what or whom is he learning social skills?
00:02:17.060 From the other students, his peers.
00:02:19.180 He has teachers, of course, but the teachers are vastly outnumbered by the students.
00:02:22.900 The child in public school learns how to act, what to say, what to believe, largely by mimicking the other kids in the school.
00:02:29.700 His social success, and therefore, from his perspective, his happiness, depends on his ability to fit in with, blend in with, imitate the other kids.
00:02:39.440 But the problem is that the other kids are just as confused and lost as he is.
00:02:43.360 They're looking to him for cues.
00:02:45.040 He's looking back at them.
00:02:46.160 This is socialization, sure, but it's a form of socialization uncomfortably reminiscent of, like, Lord of the Flies,
00:03:02.420 a book that I read in public school and found myself thinking way too often as I read it, wow, I can really relate to this.
00:03:09.420 So what about homeschool?
00:03:10.860 Well, in homeschool, the child spends most of his time around his parents and his siblings.
00:03:14.480 There 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.
00:03:24.160 If a homeschool child seems weird to you, it's probably because they're more mature, more socially advanced than the typical child.
00:03:32.620 They've learned how to act, how to conduct themselves by imitating adults.
00:03:36.580 That 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.
00:03:44.980 And it's not like homeschool kids, pandemic notwithstanding, never spend any time around other kids.
00:03:49.280 It's just that they don't spend all of their time around other kids.
00:03:52.380 That's a good thing.
00:03:53.100 And that's why the socialization argument against homeschool is a big, fat lie.