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March 13, 2021 - The Matt Walsh Show

03:53

The Biggest Lie About Homeschooling

Matt Walsh exposes the most common lies we're told about homeschooling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	If public school is supposed to be the good socializer, one wonders why it's done such a poor job of it.
	Many lies are told by those who want to stop you from making the choice to educate your own children.
	They'll say, for example, that homeschool kids don't perform as well academically as public school kids.
	While research has consistently shown that to be a lie, they'll say that parents aren't as qualified to teach their own children.
	That's clearly untrue.
	What a child needs most of all is not tutoring from experts in every academic discipline.
	He's not gonna receive that in public school anyway.
	But a personalized educational experience tailored to his own unique needs.
	Nobody's better equipped to provide that than his parents.
	But by far, the biggest lie about homeschooling, and also the most common argument made against it, is that homeschool kids aren't properly socialized.
	This line is especially ironic now, as public school kids have been trapped in their homes behind computers for a year.
	But putting the lockdowns aside, the claim that homeschooled kids won't develop the excellent social skills of public school children is absurd for a number of reasons.
	The first being that public school kids don't have excellent social skills, or any social skills at all.
	To the people who make this claim, I want to ask, have you spent any time, you know, in society?
	Maybe you've noticed that, though we are a society mostly populated by people who spent their formative years in public school, we are also a society plagued by crippling anxiety, neuroses, ample insecurities, all sorts of antisocial behavior.
	If public school is supposed to be the good socializer, one wonders why it's done such a poor job of it.
	In the schools themselves, we're told that bullying is an epidemic.
	We know that drug and alcohol abuse are major problems.
	Childhood suicide was on the rise even before the lockdowns accelerated the trend.
	Sure, you may have met an awkward homeschool kid and youth group when you were in seventh grade, but if you can draw sweeping conclusions based on that anecdotal evidence, what kind of conclusions should we draw about public school based on quite a bit more evidence?
	It seems that experience and evidence points to public school, not homeschool, being the environment that really stunts the development of social skills.
	Why is that?
	Well, it's all about social cues.
	In public school, where is the child getting his social cues?
	From what or whom is he learning social skills?
	from the other students, his peers.
	He has teachers, of course, but the teachers are vastly outnumbered by the students.
	The child in public school learns how to act, what to say, what to believe, largely by mimicking the other kids in the school.
	His social success, and therefore, from his perspective, his happiness, depends on his ability to fit in with, blend in with, imitate the other kids.
	But the problem is that the other kids are just as confused and lost as he is.
	They're looking to him for cues, he's looking back at them, and together they travel around in circles.
	Around and around, going nowhere.
	All of the kids looking to all the other kids for guidance, attention, and approval.
	This is socialization, sure, but it's a form of socialization uncomfortably reminiscent of, like, Lord of the Flies, a book that I read in public school and found myself thinking way too often as I read it, wow, I can really relate to this.
	So what about homeschool?
	Well, in homeschool, the child spends most of his time around his parents and his siblings.
	There is a much better chance in this environment that he picks up his social cues from his parents and he looks to them for guidance, affirmation, approval.
	If a homeschool child seems weird to you, it's probably because they're more mature, more socially advanced than the typical child.
	They've learned how to act, how to conduct themselves by imitating adults.
	That may make it more difficult for them to fit in with some of their more immature peers, but in the long run, the benefits are clear.
	And it's not like homeschool kids, pandemic non-withstanding, never spend any time around other kids.
	It's just that they don't spend all of their time around other kids.
	That's a good thing.

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