Why Homeschooling Works: The Socialization Benefits You Might Have Overlooked
Why Homeschooling Works: The Socialization Benefits You Might Have Overlooked
The second in a series
Dear Readers,
Next week I’ll get back to complaining—er, critiquing—groupthink in entertainment and media, but today I take another whack at groupthink in education.
Many are worried about whether homeschoolers are socialized properly. That’s a fair question, but it’s one that’s framed in a rather myopic way.
You’ve told me that you’re interested in this topic, so today I offer the second installment in an occasional series on the socialization benefits of homeschooling.
Please continue to let me know—via likes, comments and emails—what you like and don’t like, and what you’d like to have me cover in the future.
Thanks for making Shiny Herd a part of your day!
All the best,
Ted
After getting shot by enemy fire he had to eject, but as he floated toward the ocean he was now even more vulnerable.
The enemy began firing again, but a helicopter swooped in. Somehow it absorbed enough fire to shield him and still managed to remain airborne.
It sped away, and that’s how a Vietnam vet named Joe survived his closest call.
Recently, my nine-year-old son spent an afternoon at his grandparents’ house listening to Joe tell his story. My son loved it—he even got to examine Joe’s medals and photos from many years ago.
The afternoon with Joe was organized by Joe’s friends, Vic and Angie Balaker, who also happen to be my parents. Joe was something of a guest lecturer as my parents have told my son many of their own stories. My wife and I homeschool our son, so he gets to spend more time with his grandparents than he otherwise would.
I don’t want to make homeschooling sound idyllic. It’s far from that. It’s often frustrating and exhausting, and of course many school kids enjoy environments that help them grow into good people.
But homeschooling does enjoy some often-overlooked socialization benefits. Last week I addressed free play, but today it’s all about mixing.
Mixing Ages and Environments
Traditional schools segregate students by age, and expect them to spend six to seven hours per day in the same location. But it’s tough to learn about the real world when you spend so much time separated from it.
Homeschooling makes it easier to mix ages and environments.
My son regularly mixes with younger kids, kids his age, older kids, Gen Zers, Millennials, Gen Xers and members of the Silent Generation (he’s a little low on Boomers for some reason).
His regular environments include our home, a farm, various friends’ houses and parks (often for homeschooler meetups), jiu jitsu, soccer practice, church, the library, and his grandparents’ house where they take him to lunch and various outings.
My wife spearheads various homeschooler field trips to farms, aquariums—even to In-N-Out Burger. I thought she and my son were pulling a fast one, but it turned out to be a legitimate field trip. They even met the CFO!
SEE ALSO—
The Socialization Benefits of Homeschooling: Free Play
Back to *Home* School: 5 Lessons I’ve Learned
My wife and I are independent filmmakers and consultants and we often take our son with us on work trips. He’s been on film sets, attended a studio sound mix, a color-correction session, chatted with animators and sound effects specialists, actors, directors, producers, and at least one casting director.
He’s sat through many long dinner meetings. I’m sure he’s been bored many times, but that’s fine. He’s observing how adults behave and he’s learning self control.
Invariably, the conversation will turn toward him and he’s very happy to engage in a spirited back-and-forth with anyone. Our work often takes us to university campuses, so he’s had the chance to speak with professors of philosophy, history, economics, public policy, English and more. At a dinner in Boulder, Colorado, the server was so impressed with our son’s patience that he presented him with a complimentary dessert!
My son is much more cosmopolitan than I was at his age. He’s befriended an autistic college student and has had long conversations with people from many countries (including South Korea, India, and Nigeria) and many faiths (including Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and many varieties of Christianity).
Mixing Cultivates Perspective
I never liked school, but I didn’t loathe it like many people do. I’m lucky that I never dealt with serious bullying, but my heart breaks for kids who fear going to school. I can’t imagine the sense of powerlessness and despair, having to return to the same place and face the same tormentors day after day.
Today social media adds an extra layer of anxiety. Even when they’re away, many kids feel like they’re never really away from school. Greg Lukianoff puts it well: “Imagine the worst parts of junior high in your back pocket 24/7.”
Our perception of time speeds up as we age, but in junior high a single period could drag on forever. I look back now and can appreciate that high school lasted just four years. But back then four years might have been 40. In January of this year, I caught myself writing down the wrong year in a form. I didn’t write 2022—that would have been no big deal.
I wrote 2002! I missed the correct year by more than two decades!
When you’re in school, it’s very easy to get the impression that your whole world is school. It gets worse in high school where most extracurricular activities take place on school grounds with the same kids you see every day. No wonder many kids feel trapped.
Spending your days with different people of different ages and in different environments builds confidence. No kid can experience all of what life has to offer, but homeschool kids can experience a bigger slice of it. Their impressions of the “real world” are constantly shaped by the real world.
My wife and I often encounter 20-somethings who are eager to jump into the film world, but they have almost no first-hand experience with that world. They’ve never been on set. They don’t know what a producer does or how a film gets made.
In a mixed environment, nine-year-olds still pick up social cues from other nine-year-olds. But the impact of the most popular kids is diluted by other influences—by the 12-year-old at the farm or the teenager at jiu jitsu.
My son’s jiu jitsu class ends right before mine, so he sticks around for the advanced adult class. There he experiences an environment where grown men—Marines, welders, engineers, and computer scientists in their 20s to 50s—engage in controlled violence.
He learns the gravity of conflict—fighting should be a last resort. And if you’re too cavalier at practice, someone’s arm could get broken.
He observes how a blackbelt behaves. He’s not cocky and threatening, he’s calm and confident. He delights, not in humiliating others, but in helping them learn.
My son is expected to carry out versions of that responsibility, such as being extra-gentle while sparring with a six-year-old or showing restraint when an irritating five-year-old follows him throughout the farm. Just like all of us, a nine-year-old can be the student and the teacher.
I’d rather endure covid than smalltalk, but my son happily engages in that art with the men at my class—breaking down football games or newly-learned submissions. Of course, any kid may sign up for martial arts, but my son is the only one who observes the advanced adult class. The class ends rather late, and the other kids have school in the morning.
Beyond the Three Rs
When my son attended a traditional school, he thought he didn’t like aviation and aerodynamics. The subjects seemed boring.
That changed when he saw Top Gun: Maverick, and homeschooling allowed that spark of interest to grow.
We bought him Top Gun: An American Story, a book authored by a man who was instrumental in forming the real “Topgun” program in 1969, and he gobbled it up. We took him to the air and space museum. We found well-produced YouTube videos that use fighter jets to explain the science behind Top Gun. And, thanks to my parents, our son got to meet a real-life Maverick.
My wife and I try to resist the pull to build our son’s life around getting into Stanford or finding the most lucrative career. Schools divide days by academic subjects, and the three Rs are important.
But often what kids need most is something else.
When he’s with his grandparents, he learns about things that are more important than aviation. He sees good habits in action.
He sees lives that don’t revolve around screens. My parents' long-dead TV sits in the living room collecting books on its shelf. He sees people who grow their own vegetables and cook their own food.
He sees how Christians are supposed to behave. He sees people who have endured hardship, but remain grateful for each day.
He sees what a strong marriage looks like—this year my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. He sees how a husband should treat his wife and how a wife should treat her husband.
I hope he sees that at home as well—I think he does, but the more good examples, the better.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a soon-to-be-released feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
I recently attending a medical missions conference. On the first evening a group of attendees settled in at a dinner table and started chatting. All at the table were at least 50 years old, except for a young man on my right. One or two minutes into a conversation having absolutely nothing to do with homeschooling, I turned to him and said: "you were home schooled weren't you?" He responded, "how could you possibly know that?" He was so comfortable communicating with people outside of his peer group and homeschooling was the most likely explanation.
My kids, 8 of them were (are) also homeschooled. I've observed, and can confirm, many the advantages you mention. But one fact I don't often hear repeated is that a child should seek to be like adults, not like his peers. And the ratio of teacher to student/ taught is almost always better in homeschooling than in a public school. Also, when any of his peers become old enough to become an employer, the shared experiences of their particular age should have worn off a bit.