ZakSlayback.com | What do you mean, “are you worried they won’t be properly socialized?” You mean compared to kids who go to school? Kids who go to local public schools?*

You’re joking, right? You have to be either joking or deluding yourself.

Do you really think that sitting in a cinderblock room, being forced to learn things you don’t want to learn with people you don’t really know, is the best way to socialize anybody?

Have you ever met a schoolkid? Have you ever watched how young people interact with adults outside of the school environment? They’re usually awkward, kind of cold, and can’t actually hold a conversation.
Kids and Adults

The few you can think of actually being able to do this are extraordinary. Literally. They are extra-ordinary — beyond and above ordinary schoolkids and are only memorable because they are so rare and hard to come by. “They seem so mature!” you think when you can actually hold a conversation with them. Yes, they do, compared to their peers who are more busy picking their noses and being riddled with Ritalin to keep them from being children and actually going outside and playing.

“You can’t hold the bar for socialization for children to how they interact with adults! The reason they can’t interact with adults is just because they’re kids.”

No. It isn’t.

It’s because they view adults as figures not to bond with and hold conversations with like normal human beings, but because they view them as somebody detached and separate from themselves. They view them as authority figures, but not in the way that legitimate authority ought to be viewed (legitimate authority is earned).

At school, they come to view adults as people who read off of worksheets and State Standards for Mathematics or out of textbooks describing what John Quincy Adams did during his first term. These adults then give them work to do, none of which they have a choice in — failure to do the work is met with punishment that ranges from shaming and low grades to complete removal and exiling from the only social environment (expulsion). The adults really aren’t figures with whom you socialize as a child, and if you do, then you’re “teacher’s pet,” and promptly shamed by the other schoolchildren.

At home, the family dynamic is spoiled by the school day. The few hours left for family time are devoted to eating, getting ready for bed (to get children up at the crack of dawn to do the whole miserable day all over again), and homework, leaving little time for organic family bonding. Add into this mix that children rarely are enthusiastic about homework and going to school and parents are forced to be enforcers for the school at home.

(This — inversion of the family dynamic so that the family is playing enforcer for the school, not the other way around — is one of the particularly nefarious effects of letting school dominate our lives. School administrators like to bloviate about how they act in loco parentis, but with how much pressure is placed on parents to make sure their kids are following the schools edicts, perhaps parents are working in loco scholis during those few precious hours at home.)

So the children come to view their parents as an extension of the drudgery of school. Somebody has to crack the whip to do worksheets at home if the person who cracks the whip at school can’t follow them home, after all. Even in the most healthy schooled families, where children don’t have to be coerced by parents to do homework, the time that could be spent building a relationship between the parents and the children is eaten up by homework, after school activities, and dreading the next day of school.

It’s no surprise school children are terrible at socializing with adults, then. They spent 15,000 hours of their young lives learning that adults are people to impose drudgery on them. The little time they could be spending building relationships with adults is devoted to doing this drudgery, lest they be left behind. Read Entire Article

By Zak Slayback

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