Be assured that school is a terrible environment for providing a healthy, social atmosphere for your child.
Children are grouped by narrow, arbitrary metrics of birth date and geography. Where else in life do you only socialize, work, or play with people your own age who also live in close proximity?
Every relationship with an adult in school is authoritarian. They are large humans who assume the authority of parents, yet have none of the care for, nor knowledge of, the child that a parent does.
Independence is discouraged in every policy. What you will do, when you will do it, and how you will do it are micromanaged. Your success is measured by your ability to conform. Once they determine your level of compliance, you are separated from classmates of different abilities. IQ tracks closely with social status. Separate students by IQ and you will inevitably separate them by social class. In practice, homogeneity is valued over diversity.
When you are allowed to eat, speak, move, go to the bathroom, or even ask for these things is dictated. I got in trouble in school for raising my hand too often. Curiosity and independence are disruptive to their power.
Ideological conformity is increasingly enforced in schools, students have very little ability to explore their differences. This is not new, none of it is, but it is getting worse.
I don’t like being so negative. I understand that this has become a norm in modern society (compulsory education is only 100 or so years old) and the home education path is foreign to most.
What you have been seeking in a school environment is all but impossible. With homeschooling, you can now access a much wider and deeper interaction with humanity.
We have a weekly park day group that illustrates this perfectly. We’re a group of families of all educational stripes. We formed in 2020 with the backdrop of virtual-, crisis-, pandemic-, home-, hybrid-, and other “school” models. We welcomed everyone who wanted to respect individual choice and created a social atmosphere where every other opportunity to congregate had been banned.
We started as just two families, one Christian anarchist (mine) and the other left-leaning atheist. A year later our membership has exploded and we had more than 20 families from all over New Castle County, and beyond, show up last week. I’ve never been around a kinder group of people with a wider set of perspectives and experiences. Most don’t mask, but some do, some are heavily vaccinated and some are not, and they are all welcome. Neither the adults nor children question each other’s medical choices without an invitation to do so (folks know no topics are off limit with me).
We meet for at least four hours and the children are entirely self-directed. The parents circle up to share frustrations, funny stories, resources, and so much more. We do not set up games or activities. The children run from age one to teen and break into groups based on interest. That can be a softball game, video game discussions, a walk in the woods, or whatever their imaginations come up with.
Without adults watching their every move, the kids explore their differences in meaningful ways. I have been told of passionate and challenging, often compassionate, conversations between children of different faiths and beliefs.
We don’t segregate the children from us, but they generally don’t want anything to do with the parents. Occasionally, and this happened with me last week, a kid will stop for a snack and be excited to tell an adult about their discoveries or interests. They have the expectation that if they are polite, a non-parent adult will take time to listen sincerely. Home educated children are much more likely to look an adult in the eyes while they speak. I’ve observed that school children often gaze away or at the ground. The relationships that children build with adults in this environment are natural and can lead to voluntary mentorship. Voluntarism and boundary setting in relationships is a skill that is critical in developing healthy adults and families.
Home education and a learning lifestyle can provide a real world atmosphere of collaboration and manageable confict in which your children can thrive and realize their best potential selves.