Every week I go out of my way to speak to teenagers just to see what's going
on in their minds. Too often the answer is, "Nothin'." Public school students
seem to have this glassy, disorganized, disoriented look about them. They're
preoccupied with things that don't matter, especially image and conforming to
peer pressure. I really do keep trying to argue myself out of this observation,
but it grows inexorably the more teens I interview. So tell me, where is this
socialization the government school crowd always promotes as the reason for not
home schooling?
When home schooling took on serious momentum two decades ago, educrats
chanted the mantra that home schoolers couldn't possibly get the same quality
education that students in public schools had, nor could their parents teach
them because they weren't qualified to do so. However, as home school scores on
standardized tests soared above public school scores and home schoolers took top
positions in national academic competition, that argument went down in flames,
although some ideologues will try to resurrect it every now and then.
Needless to say, home school's success was embarrassing for the educrats, who
then contradicted their earlier arguments by complaining it wasn't fair to allow
home schoolers in national competition because they had an unfair advantage over
public schoolers. After all, those educated at home had more one-on-one time
from those same parents the educrats originally said were too incompetent to
educate their children!
Time for a New Mantra
The latest mantra asserts that home schooled kids - although possibly better
educated - just can't be socialized in a home school setting. Once again
experience is showing just the opposite. The lack of social presence in public
school teens is a direct result of the "socialization" of our educational
system. Thanks to the elitists, today's public school students are taught
dialectically rather than didactically. They are taught that there are no
absolute facts or morals, and a thought process based on feeling and collective
thinking has been substituted for individuality and logical, rational thought.
History has been revised to match politically correct guidelines and the basis
for belief in one's culture destroyed.
A large part of public curriculum is devoted to shaping attitudes and beliefs
into a relativist, socialist mindset rather than educating the students in the
basics and the classics, which served a previously literate country well for
generations. This accounts for the glassy look that so many public school
students exhibit - nothing going on upstairs. In talking with them, many would
like to have something going on but just don't know what or how because their
dialectic public education didn't teach them how to achieve it. The bottom line
on the dialectical model is "group think"; without a group, the individuals
can't think.
Home schoolers, on the contrary, have escaped the morass of public
educational theory and returned to the traditional form of didactic education:
facts, phonics, mathematics, self-responsibility, and logical thought. It shows.
Colleges are soliciting home schoolers because they can think uniquely and
out-perform their public school peers. Home schoolers are bringing fresh,
creative air into an otherwise stuffy academic environment, which is why it
represents such a threat to the education establishment.
So what about socialization? It doesn't really happen in public high schools
because those are abnormal environments. Nowhere in life - not even in the
military - will one be associating strictly with people of one's own age or be
subjected to massive amounts of mind-numbing, conformity-inducing peer pressure,
which has nothing to do with real life. Moreover, they will be confronted with a
myriad of moral and sometimes physical hazards that their relativistic education
leaves them singularly unprepared to face. "Just say no" doesn't cut it without
a solid, absolute, moral basis for saying "no."
The stratification of students into age-related peer groups has choked off
the ability of teens to model from and communicate with those older than one's
self, which is how maturational development is supposed to occur. It used to
happen that way when students were educated at home or in small schools where
the ages were mixed. One learns to be an adult from adults; not from other teens
pretending to be adults. In any stratified school situation, the students are
forced to model after each other - the blind leading the blind.
Combine deprivation from normal inter-age interaction with the imposition of
values and beliefs contrary to their parents and one finds the adult-teen
"communication gap" so widely posed as "normal"; another problem created by
socialization in public education. It is also the source of "normal" teen
rebellion, which isn't normal at all. It's one thing to teach youth to be
independent and self-sustaining but that doesn't require rebellion. Teen
rebellion is the product of communication cutoff between teens and parents
because they spend the majority of their day apart and, in the case of teens, in
an artificial environment called public education.
Reality Shock
The moment teens leave high school, the majority of the so-called
socialization is found to be worthless. No one cares about their feelings or
image. "What can you do?" and "What do you know?" are the real questions. Once
public schoolers emerge from high school, they discover that all the
socialization skills they learned in dealing with peer pressure don't apply in
the real world. Meanwhile, the inter-age communication skills they need are
sorely lacking. Most public schoolers I've met can't think or express themselves
clearly and concisely and have a very distorted view of both history and
society, imposed upon them by a radical leftist curriculum (see Worldview
Wars for further study).
Home schoolers, I have found, are much better integrated, being as conversant
with adults as with peers on a wide range of topics. They are skeptical of much
of the peer-pressure nonsense their public school peers accept so readily
because they have found they can truly be individuals without fear.
* * *
[John Loeffler is host of the nationally syndicated news program, Steel
on Steel, heard at www.steelonsteel.com.]
