Today we went to an open gym time, geared primarily to homeschoolers, at a local gymnastics center. There were more kids there than we've seen when attending in the past. I recognized one young man, perhaps 11 years old. He came to my attention because he wasn't responsive to the requests of gym staff that he follow safety rules. Sometimes he argued with the staff while continuing to disobey; other times he just went back to breaking the rules as soon as the right back was turned. I've never figured out who his parents are. I don't know whether they drop him off, or just keep a low profile during open gym. (Most parents don't hang out with their kids in the gym. I'm in there because T is young enough that the gym wants me close by him to help keep him safe while he plays.) This boy seems to fly just below the level of defiance that would get him banned from open gym -- that's a guess, since I've never seen someone ejected, but judging from the staff members' demeanor, they're near an edge with him.
It got me thinking about part of the socialization aspect of homeschooling. People accustomed to school often wonder how homeschooled kids learn to get along with other kids or live by the rules of the world. Homeschoolers and unschoolers often counter that school doesn't exactly teach that lesson well, to judge from the bullying, ostracism, and other social strife that exists and persists in many school situations. They also point out that school is not much like most non-school situations in the real world (unless we aspire for our children to hold jobs where they are told exactly what to do at all times, with very little chance to use their own initiative, work collaboratively, define the tasks they are working on, or otherwise contribute their own thinking to shaping their worlds), so learning to deal with the rules of school doesn't necessarily prepare one for work or other adult realities. Also, school is a highly artificial situation in which kids spend most of their time in very narrow age groups, whereas the real world involves lots of interactions beyond one's age peers, with people associating based on common interests, goals, or other characteristics.
Parents have many different approaches to discipline, obedience, manners, and so forth as they rear their children. Teachers have some variation in this respect too, but having been both a classroom teacher and a parent, I've seen that teachers, more than parents, require a high level of compliance do do their jobs. Parents can deal, if they choose, with a range of conditions besides total obedience, but with 20-30 kids or more and a lack of compliance in the classroom, chaos is the result. So perhaps a lot of homeschooled kids have had less experience with adult expectations of immediate compliance, and this leads them to respond less readily to adults in the world telling them what to do.
This doesn't have to be a bad thing, if the kids have some kind of appropriate response other than immediate compliance, such as politely asking the reason for the request or rule, or agreeably making a suggestion about another way to achieve the goal of the request or rule, and being willing to listen if there's a reason their suggestion is not going to work out. Real people in the real world do these things. But I do think kids need to know that some requests require compliance. If a police officer or other public-safety person is giving you a direct order, the situation will generally call for compliance first and discussion later, if at all. And if a staff member in a gym is telling you not to stand on top of a pile of mats, getting down before arguing will get you further toward what you want than the reverse, unless what you want would not be okay with the staff member under any circumstances.
And maybe that's what I'm seeing -- not a child who doesn't know how to navigate the world of external requirements, but one who is in rebellion against those requirements, and willing to push harder than I would be to get what he wants. I guess my own choices reflect a belief that working within the system -- going along to get along, in a way -- will get me more of what I want than openly flouting the system. This could be because my parents and others were willing to listen to me and be flexible when I was persuasive, or when they realized their initial approach might not be the best approach. Perhaps this boy's parents don't show that kind of flexibility, so open disobedience is the only way he knows to get outside the little box he's in most of the time.
Whatever the case is with him, some things I'll be explicitly teaching my kids are that various parts of the world have rules and authorities that require compliance, even if their rules are not the same as the rules of our own household; that I do expect them to comply with instructions from adults in whose care I have placed them, unless those adults are being abusive or unsafe; and that often the best way to get what you want is to work within the limits that external rules and authorities impose. Yes, discuss and question the rules if they don't seem right; but when you can, do it in a way that doesn't position you in open defiance, because that will make the people in authority much more defensive and resistant to reasoning with you.
The thing that bothers me about this stance is that I do believe in the value of civil disobedience when laws or governments are unjust. So I'll have to work on sprinkling in stories of resistance to unjust authority. Thinking about this has piqued my interest in a question I can't yet answer, though -- have successful resisters, revolutionaries, and disruptive thinkers in history generally been the product of the system (and therefore needed to know how to work within it as well as against it), or outsiders and resisters more or less from the start? Or have they combined elements of both? I welcome your comments and pointers to useful stories.
It got me thinking about part of the socialization aspect of homeschooling. People accustomed to school often wonder how homeschooled kids learn to get along with other kids or live by the rules of the world. Homeschoolers and unschoolers often counter that school doesn't exactly teach that lesson well, to judge from the bullying, ostracism, and other social strife that exists and persists in many school situations. They also point out that school is not much like most non-school situations in the real world (unless we aspire for our children to hold jobs where they are told exactly what to do at all times, with very little chance to use their own initiative, work collaboratively, define the tasks they are working on, or otherwise contribute their own thinking to shaping their worlds), so learning to deal with the rules of school doesn't necessarily prepare one for work or other adult realities. Also, school is a highly artificial situation in which kids spend most of their time in very narrow age groups, whereas the real world involves lots of interactions beyond one's age peers, with people associating based on common interests, goals, or other characteristics.
Parents have many different approaches to discipline, obedience, manners, and so forth as they rear their children. Teachers have some variation in this respect too, but having been both a classroom teacher and a parent, I've seen that teachers, more than parents, require a high level of compliance do do their jobs. Parents can deal, if they choose, with a range of conditions besides total obedience, but with 20-30 kids or more and a lack of compliance in the classroom, chaos is the result. So perhaps a lot of homeschooled kids have had less experience with adult expectations of immediate compliance, and this leads them to respond less readily to adults in the world telling them what to do.
This doesn't have to be a bad thing, if the kids have some kind of appropriate response other than immediate compliance, such as politely asking the reason for the request or rule, or agreeably making a suggestion about another way to achieve the goal of the request or rule, and being willing to listen if there's a reason their suggestion is not going to work out. Real people in the real world do these things. But I do think kids need to know that some requests require compliance. If a police officer or other public-safety person is giving you a direct order, the situation will generally call for compliance first and discussion later, if at all. And if a staff member in a gym is telling you not to stand on top of a pile of mats, getting down before arguing will get you further toward what you want than the reverse, unless what you want would not be okay with the staff member under any circumstances.
And maybe that's what I'm seeing -- not a child who doesn't know how to navigate the world of external requirements, but one who is in rebellion against those requirements, and willing to push harder than I would be to get what he wants. I guess my own choices reflect a belief that working within the system -- going along to get along, in a way -- will get me more of what I want than openly flouting the system. This could be because my parents and others were willing to listen to me and be flexible when I was persuasive, or when they realized their initial approach might not be the best approach. Perhaps this boy's parents don't show that kind of flexibility, so open disobedience is the only way he knows to get outside the little box he's in most of the time.
Whatever the case is with him, some things I'll be explicitly teaching my kids are that various parts of the world have rules and authorities that require compliance, even if their rules are not the same as the rules of our own household; that I do expect them to comply with instructions from adults in whose care I have placed them, unless those adults are being abusive or unsafe; and that often the best way to get what you want is to work within the limits that external rules and authorities impose. Yes, discuss and question the rules if they don't seem right; but when you can, do it in a way that doesn't position you in open defiance, because that will make the people in authority much more defensive and resistant to reasoning with you.
The thing that bothers me about this stance is that I do believe in the value of civil disobedience when laws or governments are unjust. So I'll have to work on sprinkling in stories of resistance to unjust authority. Thinking about this has piqued my interest in a question I can't yet answer, though -- have successful resisters, revolutionaries, and disruptive thinkers in history generally been the product of the system (and therefore needed to know how to work within it as well as against it), or outsiders and resisters more or less from the start? Or have they combined elements of both? I welcome your comments and pointers to useful stories.
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