I’ve cut back on the amount of commenting I do on blog threads lately, mostly because I just don’t have the time to commit to serious reading and response and follow-up. But earlier this week I clicked on over to the interesting (read: heated) discussion going down at the blog Yes Means Yes on a thread written by Thomas about “Public School, Homeschool, Parents and Gender Roles.” The whole thread is a fun/irritating read (if you dislike generalizations, be warned); after reading through it I felt compelled to offer the following personal perspective (here slightly edited for clarity).

Movie, Reviewed asked: “I’ve heard accounts of homeschool kids having problems relating to their peers precisely because they didn’t have the social experience of school and were therefore isolated from the mainstream of American youth culture.

I’d be interested to hear from folks who were homeschooled about their experiences with that.”

My response:

I was home educated from birth on (and, as an older child, chose to continue learning at home until college) and while I can’t begin to tackle all of the stereotypes and generalizations Movie, Reviewed is making about a very heterogeneous subculture, I can speak about my own personal experience making social connections beyond my family.

I have always been a very intense one-to-one relationship sort of person. From a very young age I preferred time spent with one or two other people to large groups of folks, which I found overwhelming. I don’t believe this is because of my home education, but rather a personality thing that my home education allowed me to build on as a strength, rather than getting me stereotyped as “antisocial.” Throughout my life, I have been able to choose and invest in friendships with a diverse bunch of folks irregardless of age; I have always been confused by the emphasis in our society on fitting in with one’s age-peers; I prefer spending time with people at all different stages of life since in my experience it leads to much more diverse conversations and opportunities to see things from new perspectives.

My girlfriend and I have conversations about the relationship of homeschooled kids to mainstream youth culture. She learned at home until high school and then went to a public school in 9th grade. Somehow, we still manage to communicate successfully and have a meaningful relationship. True, she has certain cultural references from her youth that I don’t have (just as I have cultural references from mine she doesn’t). Much like if I had grown up in a different country, I have a different body of knowledge than she does that, in the end, just means we have a more diversified pool of experience to draw upon. I don’t feel that it means I have somehow lost out in some vital, debilitating way to “mainstream” adolescent experience.

I would make two further, relatively brief, observations.

The first is that unless you choose as a parent to remove your children from the society of others altogether and isolate them in a remote geographic location with no internet or media connections, there is little danger of them not imbibing some measure of dominant cultural understanding. By definition, dominant cultures demand some level of understanding even from those who are forced (or choose) to live on their margins. So I feel that the panic about home-educated kids not experiencing mainstream culture is at least overblown if not totally disconnected from the reality of a highly inter-connected world.

The second point I would make is to question the assumption that “relating” in the sense of “agreeing with” or “having the same experiences as” one’s peers is a worthy goal to have for one’s children. Many home educators choose to allow their kids to learn outside of the institution of school precisely because they are wary of the values that are imbued in institutional education, or wary of the lessons their children might learn about power and worth from the hidden curriculum of school spaces (for example from bullies whose manipulative behavior goes unseen and unchecked). Home education is often consciously, unabashedly counter-culture in its aims (although, as I suggested at the beginning of my comment, the direction of that counter-culture impulse is far from uniform). So to reiterate: Movie, Reviewed’s concern over home-educated children not meshing well with their schooled peers seems to assume that it is in the best interest of the home-educated kids to alter their behavior in the directed of the schooled kids; I would turn the question back around and ask why the change in behavior shouldn’t come from the other direction.

Stepping back even further from Movie, Reviewed’s framework, I would suggest that “relating” to others in the world is less about uniform experience and behavior than it is about the process of developing skills for encountering others different from ourselves. Skills such as listening, curiosity, empathy, patience, self-awareness, self-confidence, and humility. Taken together, these can help us learn from those whose background and life experiences are vastly different from our own. In that alternate frame of reference, the particular site in which those skills are learned (at home, in a school) are largely irrelevant: home-based education has potential to equip young people to venture out into the world curious about the diversity they will find there.

In my own experience, not being confined to a classroom for X number of hours a day socializing mostly with people of my same age actually broadened, rather than narrowed, the realm of my social relations. In contrast to my schooled friends, I spent much more time interacting with people who were younger and older than I, and who spent their days doing different things than I did. I don’t feel impoverished because of that, nor do I feel unequipped to navigate the realm of the “grown-up” world: it is the world in which I have lived my whole life.

I realize home education per se will not magically make this sort of openness to experience and social interaction happen . . . but I also think it is dangerous to assume that schools, public or private, will either. Neither are a panacea for addressing the inequalities of our society or the impoverishing social isolation that many people feel. I think the answers to those issues need to happen on a deep cultural level rather than putting our faith in one particular institutional framework (public schooling, after all, is a relatively recent invention!).

So I saw this story come across my feeds last week, about a German family who’ve won the right to stay in the United States because of their decision to home educate their children.

A US judge has granted ­political asylum to a German family who said they had fled the country to avoid persecution for home schooling their children.

In the first reported case of its kind, Tennessee immigration judge Lawrence Burman ruled that the family of seven have a legitimate fear of prosecution for their beliefs. Germany requires parents to enroll their children in school in most cases and has levied fines against those who ­educate their children at home.

So on the one hand, let me make it clear that I’m absolutely behind the idea that parents have the human right to determine the education of their children (see Article 26.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). As long as the kids aren’t being abused — and I don’t believe the act of home educating alone constitutes abuse — than the reasons the parents choose to home educate are none of my beeswax. And I believe it’s wrong that school-based education is mandatory anywhere in the world.

However, I admit that my first reaction to this story was: aren’t there other people with more pressing need to escape human rights violations than a family from Europe who want to keep their children out of school? According to the Guardian story, there were over 40,000 applications for political asylum to the U.S. in 2008 and only one in four were granted. Surely some of those who were denied asylum were escaping horrors far worse than compulsory school-based education (and this is coming from someone with a confirmed allergy to institutional schooling).

The other thing that bugs me is the fact that the German family is identified in the story as Christians being “persecuted for their beliefs,” and were defended in court by a lawyer from the Home School Legal Defense Association, a conservative Christian organization. The founder of the HSLDA is also the founder of Patrick Henry College, a politically-conservative institution explicitly catering to Christian home-schooled teenagers who are interested in a career in politics. Patrick Henry College sent an unprecedented number of interns to the White House during the Bush administration, and involvement with a particular administration does not mean blanket approval of all of said administrations policies, I do not believe that the folks who support the HSLDA and Patrick Henry College are, say, big supporters of easing immigration restrictions generally. Would the HSLDA have been so quick to offer legal support to a Japanese family who practiced Shinto, or a Mexican family who Catholic, or a Scottish family who wanted to free range parent without reference to religion? I guess I’m just wondering how much this case of asylum is about education and how much it’s about the resonance of this particular family’s story with the story of many Euro-Americans (as well as the founding mythos of our nation as one established by Europeans fleeing religious persecution in their native land).

Last week, Hanna found this story from the UK-based Independent on bullying at Universities and sent it to me (on the premise that I’m always interested in the education beat; see yesterday’s rant about “liberal” academies) and, indeed, I was interested and started drafting a post about the problem of bullying and what folks who report on and attempt to combat bullying might learn from feminists who talk about “rape culture.”

That’s still a post I might write, since I think the analogy — while imperfect — helps to illuminate the way in which bullying is a systemic problem, one that continues because it’s actually supported by a culture that condones and rewards bullying behavior.

But in the meantime, I kept coming back to the original Independent article because I was bothered by the way the problem of bullying was framed.

We all know bullying occurs in children’s playgrounds, inside and outside of secondary schools and sometimes even in the adult workplace, but what about University?

This supposed sanctuary of like minded scholars has become just another place in which people compete with each other for respect and social order, and bullying has followed with it.

A psychologist specialising in bullying, harassment and inter-personal relationships, Dr. Pauline Rennie-Peyton, recognises the possibility of being bullied in all stages of life, and confirms University is no exception.

“If people are taken out of their element, they become children,” she says.

“The problem with Universities and Colleges is that if we’re not careful, students there also become children. Just because bullying in Universities is not talked about, it doesn’t mean it is not happening. I have students [come to me] and they have to deal with racism, sexual and even intellectual jealousy.”

I think they get it right emphasizing that bullying behavior happens in many social environments and at all stages of life. What bothers me is the equation of bullying with a return to childhood. “If people are taken out of their element, they become children,” Dr. Rennie-Peyton says. And bullying is the natural result? Something just didn’t sit right with me there, and it kept getting in the way of the whole “rape culture” argument I was trying to make.

Luckily, a few days after the post had stalled, Idzie @ I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write came to my rescue with a well-timed blog post on being “childish.”

When people use that word, when they say “childish”, what they mean is that anything a child comes up with, any thought, opinion, emotion, is absolutely worthless and discard-able. To be a child is to have nothing of worth to show for yourself. It’s an expression of ageism at it’s very worst!

So when someone tells me that I’m being childish, they’re not only insulting children everywhere, they’re also telling me that my opinions are worthless. That they’re short-sighted, uninformed, unimportant, and simply not worth paying any attention to.

So here’s what I want to say (for now) about bullying, about bullying being framed as a child-like behavior, and about the idea that “becoming children” being a bad thing.

We choose, as a culture, to de-value being child-like, and to denigrate those who we believe are being “childish” (that is “short-sighted, uninformed, unimportant, and simply not worth paying any attention to”). It’s certainly true that children can exhibit all of these behaviors — just like any human being. All of us are, at times, short-sighted and uninformed. We all walk into situations where we feel out of our element. Yet these human qualities become strongly associated — through language like “childish” — with childhood. And because they are qualities our culture looks down upon (and experiences that make us feel uncomfortable: most people don’t like to feel out of their element) children themselves become targets of suspicion, ill-temper, and blame simply for being young.

(The flip-side of the bundle of negative connotations associated with “childish” is, of course, that infants and children are also the venerated objects of adoration by our culture: the near-universal signifier of all things cute and precious, when in fact they are simply human. It’s the childhood version of the virgin/whore dichotomy: children are either angelic objects to be cherished and protected or unruly demons to be feared and controlled — neither approach considers children as human beings worthy of our individual respect as fellow-persons).

Bullying isn’t something that naturally occurs in childhood — it happens because young people learn that they can get what they want by manipulating power relationships. And that shrewd manipulation of power relations wins them respect and authority — not just among their peers but among adults as well. Bullying is successful because our culture as a whole — not just some segregated “childish” culture — rewards bullying. We reward people who abuse their authority, and anyone who professes shock that bullying exists in grown-up spaces like university or work environments has really been deluding themselves.

This doesn’t mean I don’t think bullying is simply “human nature” and that speaking up or acting to prevent is will be ineffectual. After all, human beings do horrible things to each other that it is clearly in our “nature” to do (that is, we’re capable of doing them), but which it is also in our “nature” to resist and condemn. People of all ages are capable of small-minded, vicious, and even evil acts; we are also all capable of empathy, compassion, love, and healing. Let’s quit dividing the full range of human capacity up into artificial categories by age, just as we’ve started resisting the divisions of “masculine” and “feminine” attributes that pigeonhole multi-dimensional people into cramped boxes of gender-based expectations.