This is a comment in response to: http://www.emilywillinghamphd.com/2012/06/liberals-who-homeschool-special-needs.html My response is longer than the comments allow, so I am posting it here.
First my disclaimer: I am conservative. We are homeschooling our children (they are 3, 2, and 1 right now, so it is not very rigorous yet). I was homeschooled from 6th grade on. I was pulled out of public school because I was failing 6th grade. At the same time, I was in the Talented and Gifted program. The primary reason I was failing was that public school was slow and boring, so I would do things that were more interesting, instead of homework. For me, homeschool allowed me to do my work at my own pace (fairly quickly) and then study more interesting things with the extra time.
Now, for the subject at hand. The biggest argument, by far, that I have heard against homeschooling is that kids don't get properly "socialized." The argument is that for kids to become socially adept, they must interact with others of their own age, in an uncontrolled environment (and public schools with 15 to 20 times as many students as teachers certainly provide this uncontrolled environment). The problem here is that before 12 to 16 years old, it is just plain stupid to put kids into an uncontrolled social environment (the internet has verified this repeatedly). Young children have poor judgement (mostly due to lack of experience and mental maturity). Putting a bunch of people with poor judgement together without any moderator will result in situations like the one mentioned in the article. They will essentially form their own government, which will typically be led by whoever is most charismatic or strongest (as in, whoever bullies the most effectively, mentally or physically). This is very bad. In fact, the cultures in many U.S. public schools are about the same as ancient barbarian civilizations like the Mongols, where the ruler was the one who killed anyone who challenged his rule. (No wonder autistic kids get physically abused. They tend to care less about power hierarchies, which is perceived as a challenge by whoever thinks they are in charge. Having mild Asperger's, I know about this.) In this environment, kids who are different (whether autistic, Down's Syndrome, or even just an unusual hair color) should expect to get bullied, and if their parents don't understand why their kid gets singled out, then they don't understand how kids work.
There is another problem with this argument. First, up until the last 100 years, there has not been a public school system that segregated children by age. Before this period, kids were primarily socialized in family, church, and community settings. These settings are very highly controlled and are not segregated by age (sometimes children would be segregated from adults, but "children" included all ages from 2 to 15, not groups for each individual age). Further though, during the last 100 years, the "generation gap" has slowly widened. Now, recent highschool graduates coming into the workforce have a very difficult time working with older workers (as in, workers 25 years old or older). I have personal experience with this (I got along fine with older workers at a large hardware store I worked at, but every single highschool student or new graduate had problems with socialization with older employees). Back before we had age segregated public schools, even 16 year olds worked well with older workers. I would argue that our school system, where students are segregated by age in an uncontrolled social environment, is the primary cause of the so called "generation gap." In real life, a vast majority of those we will be expected to get along with are not our own age. Arguing that good socialization requires uncontrolled groups of similar ages is absurd.
In addition to all of this, most homeschoolers are either fairly religious, or have the sense to find social groups for their children. My family is religious. We attend church every Sunday, which gives our children a variety of people with a large age range to socialize with. There is a 2 hour nursery class that they go to while we are in Sunday School, which has 3 or 4 supervisors for maybe 10 or 12 children (very controlled). My mom takes my siblings who are still in school to a homeschool social group and sends some of them to external classes (my brother took a science class for homeschoolers that included 10 or so other homeschooled children). In each of these situations, the social environment was controlled (maybe not so much for the science class, but this was when my brother was 16 or 17, and required less control). Good homeschoolers do this whenever possible. Homeschoolers with large families may not even need to do this, because a home with more than 4 or 5 children makes a very good, controlled social environment (it tends to include a good age range as well). In my experience, homeschooled people tend to fit into social groups with a wide range of ages far better than people who were in public school. Since this includes almost every post highschool social group on the planet, this is far more important than the kind of "socialization" that U.S. public schools provides.
Given all of this, I think that it is unfair and somewhat cruel to subject my children to the uncontrolled social environment, run by people with poor judgement (other students), that public school provides. That said, if homeschool just does not work for some of my children, then we may try public school for those children (my mom had to do this with one of my brothers, and for him it worked out very well).
Overall, homeschool should be a careful decision. Many parents cannot (or are not willing to) handle the rigor required to effectively homeschool their children, and in those cases, it is more important for the children to learn than to be in an ideal social environment. For those that have special needs children, or just don't want to subject their children to the socially toxic environment of public schools, homeschool can be a very good option, and in my opinion, the needs of the individual child should outweigh some ethereal idea that putting a lot of children together will somehow make the good behavior push out the bad. This is especially true of special needs children.
Lord Rybec
