Relative to what? Do you think kids are better socialized at school than at work, staying with grandparents, or whatever else they would be doing if they weren’t in school? It seems implausible that kids are going to be socialized efficiently by hanging out with a bunch of other non-socialized persons, rather than persons that are already socialized.
In Harlow’s monkey experiments, the most destructive thing to deprive monkeys of is contact with peers at a young age. Monkeys that don’t spend time with other young monkeys as children tend to grow up psychotic and wildly dysfunctional.
Fortunately, there are plenty of places outside of school where young humans can socialize with other young humans (especially if a lot of them aren’t going to school!) - parks, martial arts dojos, neighborhoods, etc.
I was homeschooled, and, yes, that’s true—but, it’s really not the same level of exposure as being surrounded by other people your own age for the majority of every day. When I got to college, there was a massive relative deficit in basic social skills that I had to make up rather quickly.
Because the way you interact with small children is wildly, radically different from the way that either adults or children interact with their own peers. This is also a trend I’ve observed much more widely than just myself. Homeschooled children come out weird unless their parents are very, very aggressive about socialization, much more so than most people would consider reasonable.
“Socialization” needs to be broken down a bit more, I suspect.
The trouble is that school-related socialization is very different from adult socialization. When you’re locked in a box with other people for eight hours a day, you get to know them and make friends for geographic reasons.
Adults don’t have that opportunity, though, and do have many other opportunities. Approaching someone because the teacher assigned you to do a group project together is different from approaching an attractive person at a bar.
It seems to me that homeschooling is better at teaching adult-style socialization (finding places where friends are likely, and then making friends there), which is way more useful than school-style socialization. But homeschooling typically doesn’t include the sheer amount of socialization that school does, instead filling it with things are educational or fun. Which… seems like an acceptable tradeoff, to me.
I wish I could find some science on the subject, but all I can find with some cursory googling is one study with a 30-child sample size, and a bunch of angry homeschooling parents defending themselves against the accusation. I will simply say that, in my experience, I have not observed your predictions to be accurate.
There’s a LOT of low-level socialization stuff that you mostly pick up by peer immersion (even near-neurological stuff like reading facial expressions). And then there’s the confidence factor. It’s easier to go into adulthood talking to people your own age if you’ve been talking to dozens or hundreds of people your own age every day your whole life. If you haven’t, you’re missing numerous social cues, and a good deal of confidence.
I mean, I came out relatively normal, minus some initial awkwardness—but what you hear, frequently, is ’Oh, you’re homeschooled? And you talk?” Which is not a particularly good sign.
So, a big part of the trouble with science on this subject is the selection effects. Parents have to choose to homeschool their kids, or put their kids in Montessori schools, or so on.
Another issue is that, well, social troubles are everywhere. I know lots of people whose social lives collapsed after college, because they don’t know how to maneuver socially as an adult.
So there are two cores that I’m confident in, with no commentary on how successfully they’re approached in the real world:
Prussian-style schools socialize students in the way they were designed- to be soldiers who form bonds with people they need to form bonds with and to respect authority.
Deliberate socialization of modern adults should reflect the lives of modern adults- which include frequent moves to new locations, access to the Internet, and specialization of taste. Social skills should be treated as skills, which take instruction and practice just like other skills like math.
I’m more familiar with “unschooled” children, who in my experience don’t have these sorts of problems. I don’t think any of their parents were particularly aggressive about socialization (or about anything) but they seemed to find plenty of opportunities to interact with people of all ages.
I really don’t think it’s helpful for children to socialize with lots of other children in an environment with few authority figures. They learn how to be brutal with each other and make up their own status games, rather than learning to be decent members of society.
I was being optimistic and hoping it was something else (like general objection to your overall position in related context.) As a standalone comment it seems straightforward. Status games are what allows humans to form vaguely functioning ‘societies’ in the first place. Being considered a “decent member of society” means competing at least passably well in the status game centered around moral judgement and norm enforcement.
You could imitate the adults, surely, with some adjustments conveyed verbally? Unless all the adults around you are playing weird status games and you get swatted down for doing their “I am a grownup” status moves.
The status games that adults play with each other are different from the status games they play with kids, and different from the games kids play with each other. Adults have power and responsibility that kids don’t have, so to some extent, yes, kids are swatted down for “playing grownup.” If you tried to fix that, you may well end up with alternate problems—when kids get into the college world where there’s STILL a difference between peers and authority-figures, they may end up having trouble negotiating the differences.
On top of that, a homeschool environment is simply radically different in nature than college. You usually have a small number of adults interacting with a small number of kids, which changes the kind of attention and flexibility kids have with their “adult peers.”
Some of this is a matter of conflict with a particular set of social norms—a society with different expectations of kids AND adults could hypothetically be a radical improvement over typical western societies. But it’s a non-trivial problem to solve and it’s not solved by just telling parents “treat your kids like peers” (because there are good reasons not to do that as well, children DO need authority figures of some sort)
The general belief is that school provides socialization, and that homeschooled kids who lack that tend to have poor social skills. Even if that wasn’t true, it’s a widely-shared belief, and a startup of this kind will need to address the fact that people believe in it.
I don’t think schools are likely to do a much better job of socializing their students than the various mechanisms in place before compulsory schooling; they probably do do a better job of conditioning students to accept a certain type of authority figure, but that’s an argument that doesn’t have any place in a business plan.
Those aren’t the alternative here, though. The alternative is homeschooling or whatever improvement on contemporary homeschooling we can produce. And having known a few homeschooled kids in my time, I’d have to say that no, they aren’t socialized as well on average as conventionally educated students. I’d speculate that this is due mainly to missing out on a large set of potential social contacts—many themselves poorly socialized, of course, but also including quite a few adults involved with the school system or with schoolfriends. That’s all anecdotal, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a controlled study and am not sure how you’d design one.
Do you think kids are better socialized at school than at work, staying with grandparents, or whatever else they would be doing if they weren’t in school?
That way they only socialize with adults (unless they have siblings), not with other children (with ages similar enough to consider them their peers).
Relative to what? Do you think kids are better socialized at school than at work, staying with grandparents, or whatever else they would be doing if they weren’t in school? It seems implausible that kids are going to be socialized efficiently by hanging out with a bunch of other non-socialized persons, rather than persons that are already socialized.
In Harlow’s monkey experiments, the most destructive thing to deprive monkeys of is contact with peers at a young age. Monkeys that don’t spend time with other young monkeys as children tend to grow up psychotic and wildly dysfunctional.
Fortunately, there are plenty of places outside of school where young humans can socialize with other young humans (especially if a lot of them aren’t going to school!) - parks, martial arts dojos, neighborhoods, etc.
I was homeschooled, and, yes, that’s true—but, it’s really not the same level of exposure as being surrounded by other people your own age for the majority of every day. When I got to college, there was a massive relative deficit in basic social skills that I had to make up rather quickly.
Why were adults unable to teach you those social skills?
Because the way you interact with small children is wildly, radically different from the way that either adults or children interact with their own peers. This is also a trend I’ve observed much more widely than just myself. Homeschooled children come out weird unless their parents are very, very aggressive about socialization, much more so than most people would consider reasonable.
“Socialization” needs to be broken down a bit more, I suspect.
The trouble is that school-related socialization is very different from adult socialization. When you’re locked in a box with other people for eight hours a day, you get to know them and make friends for geographic reasons.
Adults don’t have that opportunity, though, and do have many other opportunities. Approaching someone because the teacher assigned you to do a group project together is different from approaching an attractive person at a bar.
It seems to me that homeschooling is better at teaching adult-style socialization (finding places where friends are likely, and then making friends there), which is way more useful than school-style socialization. But homeschooling typically doesn’t include the sheer amount of socialization that school does, instead filling it with things are educational or fun. Which… seems like an acceptable tradeoff, to me.
I wish I could find some science on the subject, but all I can find with some cursory googling is one study with a 30-child sample size, and a bunch of angry homeschooling parents defending themselves against the accusation. I will simply say that, in my experience, I have not observed your predictions to be accurate.
There’s a LOT of low-level socialization stuff that you mostly pick up by peer immersion (even near-neurological stuff like reading facial expressions). And then there’s the confidence factor. It’s easier to go into adulthood talking to people your own age if you’ve been talking to dozens or hundreds of people your own age every day your whole life. If you haven’t, you’re missing numerous social cues, and a good deal of confidence.
I mean, I came out relatively normal, minus some initial awkwardness—but what you hear, frequently, is ’Oh, you’re homeschooled? And you talk?” Which is not a particularly good sign.
So, a big part of the trouble with science on this subject is the selection effects. Parents have to choose to homeschool their kids, or put their kids in Montessori schools, or so on.
Another issue is that, well, social troubles are everywhere. I know lots of people whose social lives collapsed after college, because they don’t know how to maneuver socially as an adult.
So there are two cores that I’m confident in, with no commentary on how successfully they’re approached in the real world:
Prussian-style schools socialize students in the way they were designed- to be soldiers who form bonds with people they need to form bonds with and to respect authority.
Deliberate socialization of modern adults should reflect the lives of modern adults- which include frequent moves to new locations, access to the Internet, and specialization of taste. Social skills should be treated as skills, which take instruction and practice just like other skills like math.
I’m more familiar with “unschooled” children, who in my experience don’t have these sorts of problems. I don’t think any of their parents were particularly aggressive about socialization (or about anything) but they seemed to find plenty of opportunities to interact with people of all ages.
I really don’t think it’s helpful for children to socialize with lots of other children in an environment with few authority figures. They learn how to be brutal with each other and make up their own status games, rather than learning to be decent members of society.
Status games are a big, big part of the behavior most people consider to be ‘being a decent member of society.’
Why was this downvoted? For stating the obvious?
I was guessing for cynicism.
EDIT: Okay, now I’m simply confused.
I was being optimistic and hoping it was something else (like general objection to your overall position in related context.) As a standalone comment it seems straightforward. Status games are what allows humans to form vaguely functioning ‘societies’ in the first place. Being considered a “decent member of society” means competing at least passably well in the status game centered around moral judgement and norm enforcement.
Maybe someone for some reason doesn’t like to read about status games in general.
Possibly because Mirror neurons—you have to have someone to imitate.
You could imitate the adults, surely, with some adjustments conveyed verbally? Unless all the adults around you are playing weird status games and you get swatted down for doing their “I am a grownup” status moves.
There’s a few problems with it -
The status games that adults play with each other are different from the status games they play with kids, and different from the games kids play with each other. Adults have power and responsibility that kids don’t have, so to some extent, yes, kids are swatted down for “playing grownup.” If you tried to fix that, you may well end up with alternate problems—when kids get into the college world where there’s STILL a difference between peers and authority-figures, they may end up having trouble negotiating the differences.
On top of that, a homeschool environment is simply radically different in nature than college. You usually have a small number of adults interacting with a small number of kids, which changes the kind of attention and flexibility kids have with their “adult peers.”
Some of this is a matter of conflict with a particular set of social norms—a society with different expectations of kids AND adults could hypothetically be a radical improvement over typical western societies. But it’s a non-trivial problem to solve and it’s not solved by just telling parents “treat your kids like peers” (because there are good reasons not to do that as well, children DO need authority figures of some sort)
The general belief is that school provides socialization, and that homeschooled kids who lack that tend to have poor social skills. Even if that wasn’t true, it’s a widely-shared belief, and a startup of this kind will need to address the fact that people believe in it.
I don’t think schools are likely to do a much better job of socializing their students than the various mechanisms in place before compulsory schooling; they probably do do a better job of conditioning students to accept a certain type of authority figure, but that’s an argument that doesn’t have any place in a business plan.
Those aren’t the alternative here, though. The alternative is homeschooling or whatever improvement on contemporary homeschooling we can produce. And having known a few homeschooled kids in my time, I’d have to say that no, they aren’t socialized as well on average as conventionally educated students. I’d speculate that this is due mainly to missing out on a large set of potential social contacts—many themselves poorly socialized, of course, but also including quite a few adults involved with the school system or with schoolfriends. That’s all anecdotal, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a controlled study and am not sure how you’d design one.
That way they only socialize with adults (unless they have siblings), not with other children (with ages similar enough to consider them their peers).