Salon: Home-schooled and illiterate - for some kids it means isolation with little education

[Amerigo Vespucci]

19. Anything that teaches a kid to function in a bubble is a bad thing.

My personal belief is that life should be filled with choices and options. Parents have a responsibility to get a kid off to a proper start in the world, but they also have the responsibility of "cutting the cord" at some point. And when they do, if they have raised that kid with blinders on, the world is going to be one tough and brutal place for them to function in. They either have to seek out a bubble similar to the one they were raised in or deal with life as a misfit in the "big picture." Of course, we create and shape our own realities...but only if we understand that we have the tools to do it. If kids are raised to conform to a certain set of principles, it's like that old story about putting the fleas in the glass jar with a lid. The fleas jump until they hit the lid. After hitting the lid repeatedly, you take the lid off and they never jump higher than where the lid used to be.