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Originally Posted by mesobe
your intelligence level is not determined by what sort of school you go to or if you like to be a loner or not. and yes, romping around the school yard *is* important social skills. so is working in a classroom with other students. Working on group projects and helping eachother out on their studies is prepping them for the workplace. Not to mention it will get them used to the idea of complete strangers telling them what to do.
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Oh yeah, I forgot. We're supposed to teach all children that they're destined to be working stiffs and to be able to bend over and take it from their bosses. What a crock. And that's how it works in school, too. "I'm the teacher, you do what I say and don't fight it," becomes "I'm the boss, you do what I say and don't fight it." Keeping a child out of school provides a professional advantage I like to call INDEPENDENCE. Sure, it's not helpful for the future middle managers and cubicle warriors of America, but I've never met a homeschooler who aspired to a job like that or held one for more than a transitory period. Most of them have worthwhile goals.
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Ive only met about...3 kids home schooled
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"having met a few kids" is no grounds for a concrete theory man
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Read: "I have next to no evidence for what I'm saying and I have explicitly admitted this."
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If the social aspect of school *really* is important, how does a home schooled kid get that kind of exposure too?
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I personally place a very low value on social interaction. I am exceedingly antisocial myself yet I keep up excellent professional relationships and get along plenty well wherever I go.
Furthermore, school is a poor model for the social activities of everyday life. School doesn't teach a kid how to go shopping, how to meet business associates/clients/employers (a job interview is different from any experience you'll have with a school teacher).
But to address your question directly: I fucking hate repeating myself.
PLAYING WITH KIDS IN THEIR NEIGHBORHOOD. Contrary to popular belief, a child's life is not limited to his time in school. Introduce the kids before they start school and they can very well still interact years later even if one goes to public school and another doesn't. Even better if there are several homeschoolers in one neighborhood.
GOING TO CHURCH. Not my kind of place, but social nonetheless.
PARTICIPATING IN COMMUNITY SPORTS OR PUBLIC SCHOOL SPORTS. Public schools are generally pretty accomodating for this sort of thing.
GETTING JOBS. mesobe says : "Gee, I wonder if working experience has any relevance to real life? Though even if the kid manages to keep a job at 16 years old he's obviously not going to survive later on if he didn't go to public school."
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Originally Posted by Chimpy
Children learn better by mingling and observing their peers than they do from authority figures. You can pick up any psychology textbook to read more about that.
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We have a name for a person who has the utmost faith in textbooks, especially textbooks in soft sciences like psychology and economics. It's The One and Only.
You expose a child more to his peers than to real role models and you know what you get? A child who wants to be like his peers, which is a sad thing. George Carlin said it best: children are like any kind of people: there are a few winners and a whole lot of losers. I wouldn't want my son or daughter's primary source of social interaction to be with the crowd of losers that is bound to inhabit a school (public or private).
EDIT: To put some credence behind my claims, I wrote a paper on the relative merits of public and home education last year, and to research for it I hunted down dozens of homeschooled students (I took the public school things from my own experience). The director of the honors program at my college homeschooled his children, and both are now college students with well above average GPAs and healthy social lives. The closest things to idiots I found in my search were a couple of brain dead Jehovah's Witnesses, and that is an indictment of their parents and their religion rather than of the method of their education.