How Two Decades of ‘Socialization’ Has Ruined You
The Mission News: November 1, 2017
Nothing bothers me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities. –Seymour Papert
We will continue to wrap up our Education Reform topics the rest of the week, but are excited to announce that November’s theme is Reading and Writing! For information about the upcoming content and focus, check out our founder’s announcement here.
If you have questions about reading and writing or subjects you’d like us to cover, shoot us an email at info@themission.co or reach out to us on social media. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!
We are happy to announce our winners for October’s giveaways! Check them out here:
Didn’t win? Don’t worry! We’ve got plenty more awesome prizes coming your way. Stay tuned for all the latest updates on this month’s giveaway challenge.
What we’re reading
Schools and Socialization: A short essay by Edward A. Wynne
“Any activity that takes a lot of time inevitably has a substantial socializing effect. When the person putting in time is young, the effect is more profound, since the adaptive conduct learned and socialization is essentially a form of learning is less likely to be contradicted by previous knowledge. Thus, schools have important socializing effects.
It may surprise you that their effects are not necessarily good. In fact, modern schools often do a poor job of socializing students to effective adulthood.”
Home Schooling Socialization is Not a Problem
This study analyzed adults and teens who were homeschooled and compared their level of social engagement to those in the same age range who went to school. The results showed that not only are homeschoolers equally well adjusted, many were actually more socially engaged than their schooled counterparts.
What we’re listening to
Don’t rely on schools to “socialize” your kid. That’s your job.
One of the silliest arguments against homeschooling and unschooling is that children educated these ways won’t be socialized. To this argument, we pose one question:
When you look around, do you feel like all your adult coworkers, friends, and family members (people that likely spent almost 20 years in school) are ‘well socialized’ and ‘well adjusted’?
Matt Walsh asks this question, and similar ones, of his listeners in this podcast episode. (He really starts to dive into the argument at about the 8:00 minute mark.)
What we’re watching
“In retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer — not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition — a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave.”
For the full transcript go here.
(At least she didn’t have her mic cut off like this young man.)
Originally published in our M-F Newsletter.
The Mission publishes stories, videos, and podcasts that make smart people smarter. You can subscribe to get them here.
