That’s exactly it. The real test should NOT be whether kids can get along with people their own age, but whether they can get along with adults. I’ve seen a lot of people who went to high school with me who were fantastic about playing the “Lord of the Flies” social system among the kids, but who were terrifically inept at dealing with adults.

Personally, the homeschoolers I’ve met do better with adults than publically schooled kids. While I know that it’s only anecdotal, I think it counts for something.

P.S. I’m also a WordPress user, and I’m wondering how that really cool preview thing works. Is it a plugin or PHP trick?

When we think of public schools we tend to think of academics – schools exist to educate our kids in what they need to know for life. They take classes in Math, English, History, Science, etc. Socialization? It just sort of happens. But in the history of the American public school movement socialization has always played a key role. In the early years the influx of huge numbers of immigrants (particularly CATHOLIC immigrants) was of major concern. What would happen if all these kids went to Catholic churches (not our own Protestant churches), and started their own Catholic schools? Why, it would ruin society! We need to make them come to a place where they can unlearn papism and backward ideas and become like us. In other words, there were clear plans of socialization in public schooling, and these plans involved a kind of secularizing. At first this secularizing was toward a Lowest Common Denominator kind of Protestantism (the stuff ‘Everyone’ believes), though in recent decades it has become just plain secularism. (For an account of this process see the essays “Educational Elites and the MOvement to Secularize Public Education: The Case of the National Education Association” and “Reforming Education, Transforming Religion, 1876 – 1931″ in teh book, The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public LIfe, edited by Christian Smith. The whole book is well worth reading.)

Now I’m not a Roman Catholic, but as a Christian, I want my children to be socialized into the Kingdom of God and its values. Not only is this not a goal of public education (and I don’t think it can or should be), but there are some features of public education – some intentional, some accidental – that positively work against this kind of socialization.

I will remain a supporter of public schools. My wife and I have friends in all levels of the local establishment. We respoect them and think they’re doing a good job. Our two oldest kids will finish out high school in the local PS. But we also give thanks that we have the option of doing something else – and think the more options people have the better. (More options for all people help relativize the secularizing tendencies of Public education.) We can’t offer our kids all that they need educationally. But we can offer them some important things that the PS system can’t.

It’s strange, though, that the very people that say my son isn’t being “socialized” comment a lot about how grown up
he acts and how polite he is. My brother even admits that he’s better behaved than his daughter, and my youngest
brother said he would hang out with William alone but not with my neice alone because of her behavior. Despite the
fact that my son is an only child he has learned to share and take turns and be polite because there are other people
in this family – me and his father. We have to share a bathroom, after all

In our case, I value the fact that K’s public schools were so racially diverse. There were times when she was the only white kid in her class. The upshot is that she knows on a gut level that the two fundamental groups that people are divided into are those who are basically nice and those who have a mean streak, and that both varieties of people come in every conceivable color, shape and size. I couldn’t have given her that. But we got all the good that there was to get on that topic by about 3rd grade.

And like the other commenter, I was shocked when the school’s response to K’s reaction to being teased was that I needed to sign her up for “anger management counseling.” I told them they needed to come up with ways to keep her from being made so angry, and that she wasn’t the only one who was angry about the treatment she was getting. I think they were ready to sign me up for counseling too!