A thing called socialization

Now, when we started out, other homeschooling families were already reporting that the great benefit of homeschooling over public education is that because children interact with adults more than they do with other children, they tend to mature much faster and their social interactions will be on more of an adult level. Hence, I am not surprised to see these same results in my own children. And I am not the first one saying this, I am just lending my voice to what homeschoolers already know. The truth is that you will become like the company you keep, and if your children spend most of their time with children they will act like children, but if they spend most of their time around adults, don’t be surprised when they behave like a young adult rather than a teenager. Faith : What about a child’s social development? - Frontiersman

COLUMBIA- Woodcrest Chapel hosted a Post-Secondary Education Fair today. Local home-schooled students at the fair visited with different colleges and universities from around the country. The annual event is designed to help students get information about further education. Representatives came from Westminster College and Columbia College, two of the more home-school friendly universities in the area. Although there are no specific scholarships available to home-schooled students, programs geared towards assisting these students are being built. KOMU.com - Education Fair Helps Home-Schooled Students - Coverage You Can Count On

Who is to blame in the Phoebe Prince bullying tragedy? Prince's death and the subsequent charges against six of her fellow students in South Hadley, Mass. has brought a community together to question exactly what is happening in their public schools just outside their door. The suspects themselves are now subject to being bullied. On Thursday, the Massachusetts Senate unanimously backed an anti-bullying bill. The bill would prohibit bullying at schools and clamp down on so-called cyberbullying by prohibiting the use of e-mails, text messages, Internet postings and other electronic means to create a hostile school environment. Character-education expert: Forget test scores, focus on attitude, effort & character

Homeschoolers have won a round in the long fight against the crackdown on family rights contained to the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of the Child, but experts say they need to keep up their guard. The convention, which is not yet ratified in the United States but has been adopted by numerous other nations, orders that children can choose their own religion with parents only having the authority to advise them, the government can override a parent's decision regarding a child if a social worker disagrees, a child has a right to a government review of every parental decision and Christian schools would violate the law if they refused to teach children "alternative worldviews." Homeschoolers win round against United Nations

One of my favorite reactions happened at my school, Fox Valley Technical College. I was chatting with another student before my class and, somewhere in the conversation, I mentioned having been homeschooled. She looked at me in amazement, and exclaimed, "I would have never guessed you were homeschooled!" To my dismay, her comment was actually meant as a compliment. She seemed to think that if I had been homeschooled, I wouldn't be able to keep up a good conversation or be able to offer ideas and somewhat intelligent comments in the classroom discussions. Chanel Volpel column: Homeschoolers don't match stereotypes | postcrescent.com | Appleton Post-Crescent

My new memoir, Love in a Time of Homeschooling, was officially launched yesterday with a feature story in The Washington Post . This article explains a little about why I decided to homeschool my daughter, Julia, for the fifth grade (I'll explain more in future posts), and it describes some of our activities. I've already had readers send emails asking why Julia went back to public school for the sixth grade. Why didn't I continue the homeschooling for the rest of her education ? Homeschool Guilt: When A Child Returns to Public School | Psychology Today

England's top comprehensives are more socially exclusive than the country's remaining grammars because schools are letting middle-class parents play the system, according to a study published today. The exploitation of "wiggle room" in the rules on admissions means not enough poor children are getting into the best comprehensives, the report published by the Sutton Trust said. Top comprehensives 'more socially exclusive than grammar schools' | Education | The Guardian