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

[Igel]

25. I'd say anything that ultimately fails to teach kids to function outside their bubble is a bad thing

But schools are a bubble. Teens set up their own society, their own structures. They're not like adult structures. They don't have adult responsibilities.

The rules aren't very adult-like. The expectations are fake-adult-like. They sort of look adult, but in fact they're not. They're a delusion, and satisfying just the minimum standards for being in high school would get most adults fired within a week. No detention, no remediation, no third second changes.

Most of my kids learn to be adults, learn to live outside the bubble, in their home lives and their lives outside of home and school. They have friends and neighbors that aren't set by school norms; they get jobs; they interact with adults, relatives or not, in fairly natural settings. I've known some home schooling disasters. But I've also known homeschoolers that were better in adult society at age 16 than in 16-year-old society. Somehow other kids' parents thought this wrong. "Kids should be kids." What a kid should be has changed over the years, varies by community and family.

When kids are exposed to "outside the bubble" stuff in school, it's usually on the side. And it's often not when they're ready for it, it's when others decide they're ready for it. Those "others" aren't adults responsible for the kids but other, often older or delinquent, kids. These are the things that the bubble that teachers and administrators is designed to mitigate--then they often turn around and implicitly say that these factors are the reason for public school.

Here's an example of "outside the bubble" behavior. A 15-year-old in my class got pregnant. She really wasn't ready for sex, much less pregnancy. She's quiet, backwards, and went out with the guy on a dare: Social pressure. She got pregnant a couple of weeks later. The girl got counseling; parents said "no" to an abortion and the girl was too meek to have an opinion. Her parents said "you will marry"; his parents said "you will marry."

Provisions were made for her pregnancy in phys ed, in what she'd have to do for classes. She had a teacher collect all her stuff for 6 or 8 weeks and deliver it to her home, tutoring her so she wouldn't get behind. Tests were proctored at home. Projects got incompletes or "excused" so as not to pressure her. She is provided with free daycare services in school and counseling. Absences because of her child's illness or checkups are excused. The school helped make sure that the government service providers were lined up for her.

Now, try this: She's 19 and working as a cashier. She's pregnant, and for the last 3 months special provisions are made to allow her flexibility in work schedule and in working conditions. Since she's making minimum wage, her employer contacts government aid agencies and makes her appointments, following up to make sure she attended. She gets free counseling at work during work hours. She gets time off with pay for absences for her checkups, 6 or 8 weeks off (with employer assistance to make sure she can do whatever work only she can do) and, when she returns to work she gets free daycare, counseling, and anytime her kid is sick or needs a checkup she's excused from work. To me, that sounds really, really cushy.

Tell me that's not a bubble, that this has taught her how to be an adult. It's keep her life from being ruined by unpunished date-rape--we figure there's little chance that the guy will actually marry her, esp. since the baby's nearly a year old and he's stationed overseas, but she's been kept in school and between parents and the school district she has time to finish her junior year.