horror stories

Not ever so long ago, I was informed by a person who shall remain nameless that children are better off at school "because then they can make some friends". This was after quite a lot of years of home-educating, and the person concerned had actually known my family for the whole time. Of course I explained that making friends was no problem at all, gave a brief outline of the social situation at the time, etc etc.

The problem with people like this is, they then just shift the argument. If I recall rightly, something like, "but it's not the same as friends you make at school- school friends share a unique experience which makes their bond unmatchable!" Something like that. But more implicit. Because saying it explicitly would sound ridiculous, obviously.

So even if I had memorised this (found on Wikipedia) it wouldn't have made any difference:

ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center of the U.S. government, has published multiple articles on homeschooling. Here's an excerpt from one which examined several studies on homeschool socialization:
"According to the findings, children who were schooled at home 'gained the necessary skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed to function in society...at a rate similar to that of conventionally schooled children.'
"The researcher found no difference in the self concept of children in the two groups. Stough maintains that 'insofar as self concept is a reflector of socialization, it would appear that few home-schooled children are socially deprived, and that there may be sufficient evidence to indicate that some home-schooled children have a higher self concept than conventionally schooled children.'"

Sometimes people just do have half-baked ideas they don't feel like thinking about properly, and they try to force them on others when they feel like they can get away with it, because that just makes them feel better. It's a common phenomenon that occurs whenever a person does anything out of the norm, which challenges people's preconceptions (uncomfortable) and threatens their existing frameworks for making moral judgements. People cling like limpets to their frameworks, because it helps them avoid dealing with difficult issues and often personal or emotional problems.

When you home educate, you get used to this sort of thing and learn to stay away from it. However, when big changes like divorce occur and things are temporarily up in the air, people see an opportunity to stir and steer things in their own direction. It's a sort of unconscious instinct, they don't actually know that's what they're doing most of the time, but, it happens. On the other hand, it sorts the sheep from the goats, so to speak. I can't honestly say that I feel great about having discovered in the past year exactly what various people really thought of me and how I'd been spending my life, but in general truth is good, so hopefully the knowledge will somehow prove useful eventually. In the meantime, should one initiate communication after such events, or merely appreciate the stony and/or embarrassed silence?

Anyway, my advice to people who know someone who is getting divorced is this: offer help, but refrain from the personal and moral judgement. Telling someone where their kids should live and who with, how they should be educated, what they are doing wrong and how they have been going wrong for the previous decade is not a good idea. It's also not a good idea to complain behind people's backs about what you see as their catalogue of irresponsible failures. None of those things help your case, and when the dust has settled you might find that seizing on what looked like a free-for-all has left you embarrassed, compromised and cut off from people who still matter.

It's shameful that adults still act like this, really. What any kids overhearing such behaviour are going to make of it in years to come one can only shudderingly imagine.

P.S. On the subject of school friends being the best most unique kind, how many of your schoolfriends do you still know? Were you able to make friends from different environments than school, as a child- and was there any difference, in your view? I imagine the main factor is that most kids spend more time with their school friends than any others.