Miley Cyrus and Homeschool

So, thank you Rebecca Thompson Dundore for your post of a blogger commenting on what Miley Cyrus' performance at the IMA's (which I thankfully missed).  It brought things together for me in a new way.

One of the common arguments against homeschooling is that children need to be socialized.  I've always thought this was a silly reason, but have been trying to put my finger on why for some time.  The underlying assumption is that children spend a lot of time with their classmates, so that children who don't have classmates are somehow missing out.  Then another home-school Mom threw me a bone when she said, "Sending children to school to learn social skills is like sending them to a candy store to learn about nutrition."  It's the quality of time children need with friends, not the quantity, that matters.

When I was grown, my Mom told me that whenever a teacher would get uppity at a parent-teacher conference, telling my parents what they should do differently (particularly when the child being discussed was my sister Crystal), my Dad has a unique way of responding.  He would say, in his calm-like-the-ocean way,  "Thank you for helping me teach my child."  He wanted to remind them that he was the one in charge of our education, not them.

I think this might just be huge.

School isn't FOR socialization.  Children don't go there to learn from each other.  They go to learn from a teacher.  They do learn from each other, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, but they go to learn from a teacher.  From teachers - from adults.  As the blogger man said, "Kids need adults," not other kids, to be their role models.  Our problem is, adults are forgetting how to be role models and are trying to be kids instead.

So, some parents send their children to school so teachers can help them teach their children.  Some parents keep them home.  This is BY NO MEANS a judgment call on anyone's education choices.  I am just saying, school isn't for socialization, and parents are children's primary teachers, no matter how many other teachers those children have.

More to ponder for me...