On The Dangers Of Home-Schooling

This is a blog post about home-schooling - and by home-schooling, I don't mean having to teach your kids at home because of Covid; I mean the radical decision to permanently teach your children at home and not ever send them to school.

I respect anyone’s decision to home-school their children, but I strongly suspect home-schooling is less good for children’s overall development than a traditional education, and that the costs will be brought to bear on young adulthood and beyond. Here’s an analogy. I think humans are like trees, and socialisation and encountering and dealing with the world full on is what makes us strong, grounded, and gives us the deep roots to withstand most natural forces. Home-schooling treats children more like bean plants, as a light, gentle organism requiring careful protection at all times, and with a trellis so it can be carefully guided in a safe manner.

Superficially, home-schooling can appear successful – especially if your child gets good grades and turns out to be a half-decent young adult. But it probably isn’t successful in the medium to long term. I’ve never met a home-schooled young adult who doesn’t lack some key behavioural traits that come from healthy socialisation, or who isn’t ill-equipped to manage the world in several essential ways, even though they themselves do not pick up the nuanced social cues that would help them understand why they are different. It won’t appear immediately obvious where the lack is when a child is not socialised properly or exposed to the challenges that come from being surrounded by peers. Although one obvious disadvantage is that if you are only being taught by parents and grandparents then you are limited to the scope of their understanding, and devoid of a diversity of input.

But there’s another profound reason that’s harder to apprehend. It’s to do with the more abstract life picture you create when surrounded by fellow pupils – it’s a bit like being immersed in a drama, with complex, multi-layered plots, intimately connected to your cognitive development - emotional cultivation, intellectual exploration, authority, diversity of problems, friendships, cultural identity, sexual awakening (interest in the opposite sex), and so forth – it resembles a shared drama, where you abstract out of it everything, good and bad, that plays a part in shaping your childhood identity. That’s an immeasurably valuable part of growing up that is not catered for in home-schooling, and its absence is not likely to be felt very tangibly by those who underestimate its power.

A bean plant, however bright and lovely, is not going to be equipped to handle the demands a tree needs to endure – and we should resist the temptation to wrap our young in cotton wool and place them in gilded cages. It won’t do them the good they need in the long run.