Maralyn Lois Polak leaps to a conclusion:
And don’t tell me the lack of socialization with others doesn’t take its toll on these kids’ psychological development. Several years ago, a seemingly pleasant family of homeschoolers rented the house next door to me. The mother and grandmother came up north from Texas with two teenagers; the father stayed behind at his Very Important Job. The older daughter, a lovely, talented cellist, was enrolled in a prestigious music school here. The younger son, a friendless prima donna with a penchant for playing the electric piano at full blast day and night, was still at home. Suddenly, after the son tried to strangle his mother and ran away one Easter, the family packed up and left. I’m not making this up.
So what are we supposed to learn from this? The only conclusion one can draw, assuming one is stupid enough to denigrate some 1.8 million kids based on one (ONE!) anecdote, is that all homeschooled students are insane stranglers. Maralyn didn’t need to tell us that she was public-schooled, like a good writer, she showed us.
Meanwhile, there’s a statistic from the UK that actually does say something about the public schooling there:
BRITAIN is in the grip of an “appalling” teenage yob crimewave, Home Secretary Charles Clarke admitted yesterday. One in four boys between 14 and 17 is a serious or regular offender, a shock government report revealed.
But, of course, the arrest of 500,000 public-schooled individuals in a country where home-schooling is almost unheard of can’t possibly tell us as much about socialization as something that happened once to someone’s neighbors.