Did you see this post on Popsugar about homeschooling and socialization? It’s basically crap, but it made the rounds on a few online corners of homeschooling.
Obviously the arguments about socialization in there are absurd. I mean, there’s no way to teach those skills without a traditional classroom? I can think of dozens off the top of my head, most of which homeschool families I know use. My personal favorite, which you probably already know, is Destination Imagination, which is nothing like being in a traditional classroom. Or maybe it’s the small, kid-run learning co-op we’ve been a part of for eight years.
But I digress. Because as silly as the socialization arguments were in that piece, it wasn’t the thing that really bugged me.
The thing that really bugged me was the way in which professional educators try to justify themselves by making learning seem like it’s a secret, arcane mystery that only they can unlock. Socialization isn’t learning to play with, talk to, and interact with other people. Oh no. “Educational socialization is much more challenging than that,” the post claims. So much more challenging that only real teachers in real classrooms can really do it.
Remember in To Kill a Mockingbird when the teacher is angry that Scout learned to read at home because she couldn’t have done it the “right” way? Seen any of the viral images of Common Core math where parents talk about how they’re no longer “allowed” to help with their second grader’s math homework because they’ll explain it “wrong”? Ever heard an educator throw around half-nonsense jargon at an IEP meeting?
Educators seem to do this all the time, trying to make it sound like they guard complex knowledge that only they can get right.
Look, I’m the last person to undervalue educators and all they do. Educators take far too much crap all the time. It’s an actual expertise. I do think I got something out of my masters degree in education, after all. There is a lot of information out there about educational psychology, curriculum design, and educational philosophies, not to mention the nuts and bolts of how schools work on every level, all of which is specialized knowledge teachers have and much of which is useful in structuring a classroom program or working in education.
But none of it is as top secret or special as some educators would like people to believe. Nor is it necessarily complex. It’s especially not magic that only some people can practice. Teaching is more of a practiced art than anything else.
Don’t buy into the idea that education is somehow only possible when provided by the keepers of the school system. I think homeschoolers are often good at seeing through this rhetoric when it comes to socialization, but sometimes get caught when it’s about other topics, like early reading instruction or middle school essay writing or even preparing a high school transcript. I’ve seen people get intimidated by dense language in educational standards, where instead of saying straightforwardly that they want kindergartens to understand that there are four seasons, they weigh it down with verbiage about “use models to represent astronomical bodies” and “understand how natural systems and the designed world work together” and other things that make kindergarten information sound like rocket science.
Not only homeschoolers, but anyone can take charge of their own learning, in school, out of school, graduated or still young. Teaching others is a beautiful thing, but it’s not classified.
