Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: home schooling

[Bitner/Stevenson (lilbert]

I think it IS important to socialize children in public schools. Take my 
niece, for example. She was raised until the age of about 11 in San
Francisco, and attended public schools. She went to school with just about
every imaginable kind of kid. She is now in Pullman, WA, going to school at
a "good" (read "white") school, where the students are closed minded and
boring. She's hooked up with the few other interesting kids at school, but I
have met them, and while they are nice enough, they lack a worldliness that
my niece has, and they are far behind her in their political and social
understanding.

As my sister has said, just about anybody can take a bunch of well taken
care of kids and teach them how to read.  Children of good parents are
practically reading by themselves when they enter school anyway. School
teaches them about how to get along with other people who are different, and
there is no substitute for just plain being around different people.
Standardized test scores are very misleading, since public schools have to
take all students, not just the best. I went to school with all white kids,
with great test scores, and I was very unprepared for life in the outside
world.
I, too, despised the upper grades. I couldn't wait to get the heck out of
town when I grew up. But I think that elementary school is very important.
And let's be real about cohousing-diverse it ain't.

--
Liz Stevenson
Southside Park Cohousing

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>
> Personally, I'm dubious as to how much socialization public schools (or
> schools at all) are good for. On one hand, there is brutal reality (ie
> society at large). On the
> other hand, adults have a fair amount of how much or which sorts of brutal
> reality they wish to endure. I hated middle school, and barely tolerated
> high school. Several of my friends feel the same way; we didn't find
> people that were on our wavelength until college and graduate school.
> Maybe some of that is also just the maturation process. But I think there
> could be much worse things than for kids to become socialized through a
> co-housing community that includes people of all ages..
>
>
> jen stevens
>
>