The Socialization Question {Part II}

I think I need to admit that the socialization question {as asked by the average person, not the academic “expert”} is asked because there are certain homeschooling families that are really odd. Sometimes these families are disliked because their community values conformity, and they just don’t fit in. In fact, I would say that conformity is often an underlying concern when the socialization question is asked. Will they fit in? Will they be liked everyone else? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Cindy recently wrote a series on the Gestapo Homeschooling Mom. I would say that the homeschoolers I’ve met that concerned me were raised by women who fall into this category. Actually, they tend to be boys raised by Gestapo Moms. They are very feminized, and I have a hard time imagining them ever separating from Mommy enough to have a healthy marriage someday.

But please notice the cause of this: the mother. This is not caused by the methodology of homeschooling per se, and not all homeschoolers will reap the same results.

There are other homeschoolers who are exceptionally smart, or exceptionally…um…not smart. They may not seem to fit in, but I’ve learned not to be quick about attributing that to homeschooling. They are what they are, and I’m not sure they’d “fit in” any better if they were thrown to the cliquish wolves in the public school system. And if they did muster the strength to conform, what qualities that are virtuous and noble would be gained by such an endeavor?

I have two basic points here. The first is that boys {or girls!} raised by the

Gestapo Moms will have their issues regardless of the method of their schooling. The second is that conformity is not a virtue.

Our culture values conformity more than ever before. This even reveals itself in our architecture, which has become quite formulaic. When one travelled the country even as recently as the 1980s, one could observe distinct personalities in different geographic areas, even within a single state. Today, strip malls with virtually identical archetectural styles fill every formerly vacant lot. For good or ill, every town looks the same. Couple that with the fact that digitized media means that a kid in Alaska can be entertained in the exact same manner as a kid in Florida, and we end up with cookie-cutter kids.

The homeschool families will stick out and make the families drowning in the culture

uncomfortable by virtue of their lack of conformity. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, to my mind, this is a very positive thing to the extent that their conformity is to Christ and His commands rather than culture.

There is a cultural tendency to dismiss homeschoolers as weird. And the experts-at-large encourage this overgeneralization. Tomorrow, I think I will write a bit about “experts,” specifically their expertise at the logical fallacy of equivocation. But I think that today it is important to note that there are a number of elements that go into the making of a homeschooling culture, and there is a lot of diversity out there. And my own past habits of judging them as “odd” were actually using the world’s standards rather than God’s.