Middle School
Home-Schooling – Teaching Real Life
When I think about it, I know almost no one of my generation who doesn’t have a story about a school trauma with a teacher or other students that affected their self-image for at least a period of their youth, if not beyond. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is mostly because schools, especially middle schools and high schools, become their own mini-societies, however unnatural a society made of up people of all one age and maturity level is in comparison to the so-called “real world”. Thus, the culture of the peer group and the school becomes the “real world” almost completely to a middle schooler or a high schooler. Just at the age when they are supposed to separating to a degree from their families and realizing their own individuality, they are thrust into a daily world where some of the most shallow “values” are used to judge them and, inevitably, many come to judge themselves negatively accordingly.
Parents who homeschool and don’t offer up their children to the prevailing culture of pre-adolescence and adolescence are often though to be over-protective and trying to shelter their children from “reality”. However, I contend that since adolescent school culture only lasts for a few years and then thrusts young people who have been almost wholly pre-occupied by ideas and issues which will have virtually no future value in helping them lead productive adult lives, that homeschooling is perhaps not as odd as it seems to some.
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