What was that about socialisation again?
Posted by Deb on Tuesday May 2, 2006 at 3:50 pm
There are lots of very good answers to the “socialisation” question - the one that comes from people who assume that kids can only learn social skills by attending schools. But here’s yet another answer to add to the list: it turns out that schools don’t do such a great job on teaching social skills anyway. Who knew? 
EducationGuardian.co.uk | Schools special reports | Call for schools to teach social skills
Children in one of the most deprived areas of Britain who can barely talk in sentences or read by secondary school desperately need to be taught basic social skills, Nottingham MP Graham Allen will tell a Westminster debate today.
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um, I think they are claiming that it’s the parents who are doing it all wrong, and that schools aren’t doing it because it isn’t their responsibility. Aren’t they?
So do schools provide for the development of social skills or not? According to this, they don’t. Yet one of the criticisms often thrown at HE is that children will “miss out” on the social skills they’d have learned at school.
I refer you to the article I criticised here - in which a teaching union rep stated of HE children, “But what concerns me is that those children will be missing out on developing their social and interpersonal skills with their peers.” It’s a fairly typical statement - but if they’re not developing those skills at school anyway…
And school must be a pretty ineffective place to learn social skills otherwise why is it necessary to have a whole subject devoted to what HE’d children learn automatically (ie. PSHE)? You’re right Deb, it’s a huge admission that school does not teach social skills. The sad thing is that those who criticise HEing seem to believe that it involves suddenly holing yourselves up from when they are of ’school age’ until they hit 16, when you let them out again, so there’s simply no arguing with them. A woman said to me the other day ‘I would home educate but I want my children to have the chance to integrate with other children’. I nearly choked on my lunch - our children were running about quite happily with the other children there in someone else’s home…NOT in school…and she failed to see the ridiculousness of her statement.
Cx
Oh people say the stupidest things. Someone once told me she wouldn’t home-educate because her children “need me to be their mother”
Someone at St John Ambulance asked Barney if he gets to meet anybody his own age, since he’s home-educated. He said “Uh… I’m here, and so are you…” That’s my boy