FOREWORD
by Patrick Farenga
Co-author of Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling
President of Holt Associates, Inc.
Former publisher of Growing Without Schooling Magazine
“What about socialization?”
That question provokes a subdued, almost
rote, response from me now that I’ve worked with homeschoolers for
twenty-five years. Probably the hardest thing about being a homeschooler
is repeatedly answering questions about homeschooling and socialization.
Often these questions are honest exchanges, but sometimes they implicitly
carry a criticism: “Aren’t you socially handicapping your child by
homeschooling them?” It is hard to feel good about discussing
homeschooling with someone who seems to assume that by keeping your family
close you are automatically suffocating them. Further, a tactful reply is
not always easy when you are fielding questions from folks who already
have their answers.
However, the last thing I have ever been
worried about as a homeschooling father of three daughters is their
socialization. Homeschooling has always allowed them lots of time and
opportunities to make and sustain friendships with children and adults. In
fact, now that my girls are young adults and teenagers I’m more
comfortable than ever with our decision to homeschool our children. All
the risks we were warned about when we homeschooled our girls turned out
to be stale conventional wisdom: they won’t learn anything, they’ll be put
in lower level classes if they return to school, they won’t be able to get
into college or find work, especically—they won’t be socialized!
Now, homeschooling isn’t the answer to
everything, and not everyone should homeschool. Homeschooling is and
should remain a self-selecting and self-correcting activity. But, given
the amount of books, articles, movies, videos, plays, and personal stories
about the everyday de-socializing experiences children experience in the
course of contemporary schooling, I am amazed how people think this type
of socialization is the best we can offer children. “It’s the real world,”
is a sad, and wrong, response. Bullying, verbal and emotional abuse,
forced labor and stress from one’s workload at least have some hope of
remedy or adjudication in the real world of adult work. In the world of
school socialization, these are just things kids must get used to. “After
all,” supporters of school socialization contend, “Our kids need to be
citizens in a democracy…” Well, now I think we’re really on thin ice. As a
homeschooling mother wrote to a school official in 1921: How can democracy
be taught in an institution that doesn’t practice it? But I digress…
Socialization. With all the tension in our world from differing political
views, differing religious views, and differing classes, we can certainly
use better social skills and socialization. However, school is
increasingly becoming a place where testing and competition are paramount
virtues, not individually-paced learning and group cooperation. Our
children need other social outlets besides the increasingly limited
opportunities schools provide, and it is homeschoolers who are finding or
creating many new opportunities for children and adults to socialize
during “school hours.” It will be a sad irony that homeschoolers may
someday soon be criticized for allowing their children to be so social
that they might fall behind their schooled age-mates who are compelled to
spend so much more of their “time on task!”
That is one reason why Rachel Gathercole’s book appeals to me: she
presents data, stories, and research about how homeschoolers develop
social skills and, in doing so, she demonstrates the wide variety of
possibilities for socializing children that exist in the real world
besides sending them to school. The other reason I like this book is that
the next time someone says to me, “I’m thinking about homeschooling but I
worry that my child won’t be properly socialized,” I can just hand them
this book.
The Well-Adjusted Child
by Rachel Gathercole
