Tag: education

Homeschool and social awkwardness

LH asks a serious question about socialization and homeschool:

My observations are this. Academically, homeschoolers are just pure genius. But the world does not work based on your grade point average. In the business world, it all also depends on who you know and how well you get along with people. And I’ve noticed that homeschooled adults–people in their twenties and thirties–often seem to struggle with the rest of the working world.

Now, I am asking for opinions on these observations. I’m not drawing a line in the sand, making any declarations against homeschooling, or anything like that. I’m looking for other people’s observations and testimonies that might prove hopeful.

I think it is a genuine issue.  I have observed the phenomenon on numerous occasions myself.  For example, at my eldest son’s first soccer practice with a new team, all of the other players sat down and listened to the coach when he started addressing them.  My son continued to stand, bouncing a ball, and was observably paying no attention to the coach.

Now, obviously I explained that his behavior was unacceptable after the practice and likely to lead to a lack of playing time.  But the fact that I had to explain this to him, when he had been playing soccer for years, was indicative of what can either be seen as a feature or a bug.  That is to say, he simply does not appear to feel any peer pressure.  The fact that everyone else is doing X not only does not instill in him any need to do X, he doesn’t appear to assign any significance to it whatsoever.

This isn’t necessarily the result of homeschooling, of course.  I am a socio-sexual Sigma and a lone wolf.  Spacebunny is also, by female standards, a lone wolf.  Both of us were public-schooled.  So, it should not be at all surprising that our son would tend to be highly independent regardless of how he was schooled, and yet, there is still a material difference between his perception of the significance of the behavior of others to him, and ours.

On the other hand, once a parent is aware of this lack of awareness, it is quite easily dealt with.  The incident at practice was two years ago.  It has not happened since; once the team begins to line up in front of the coach, he recognizes the signal and not infrequently is among the first to sit down and pay attention.  However, it appears to remain a conscious behavior and not an unconscious one.  I happen to think this will serve him well in time, as unlike the others, he has the option to go along with the crowd or not, as he consciously chooses.  Independence and auto-conformity are mutually exclusive; the parent who fears the occasional social awkwardness later in life would do well to consider what sort of problems are more likely to occur with an auto-conforming child.

However, the most significant testimony I have ever heard concerning socialization and homeschool was from the children’s pediatrician, who is a doctor of no little international repute.  We were the only homeschooling family in his practice at the start and he initially harbored some reservations about it.  However, after ten years, he mentioned that he was now fully supportive of it, in part because he had observed that our children were not only advanced intellectually, they were also the happiest children in his practice.

I think one should step back and consider what the working world presently is before concluding that those who struggle with it are somehow deficient.  What is natural or normal about spending 8-10 hours per day in a small grey cubicle, living like a rat in a cage and shuffling virtual papers while attempting to avoid conflict with various unproductive individuals of varying degrees of medication and reflexive hostility?  Considering how much the average worker has to modify his normal behavior just to avoid getting in trouble with HR these days, can one reasonably conclude that it is the homeschooled individual and not the increasingly outdated working world that is the problem?

The experts tell us that to succeed in the working world of tomorrow, it will be increasingly necessary to be independent, free of reliance upon the corporate patterns of the past, flexible, and agile.  To me, it sounds as if much of the “awkwardness” of the homeschooled individual in the eyes of the more conventionally schooled is akin to the strangeness of the mammal when viewed from the perspective of the dinosaur.

My suspicion is that the socially awkward homeschooler primarily represents a failure of the homeschooling parent to address socio-sexual issues with the child, and is little different from the tendency of most conventionally schooled men to be sexually awkward due to the maleducations they receive on the topic.  The fact that the homeschooled child is likely to automatically receive less socio-sexual education than the crude mindless one received by the conventionally schooled child does not mean that he is necessarily uneducable in the subject.

Fueling the death spiral

Glenn Reynolds notes that homeschools are putting one of America’s most enervating evils at risk, the public school:

For “notoriously inadequate” public school systems, as I argue in a new “Broadside” from Encounter Books, The K-12 Implosion, the risk is that the outflow of kids will turn from a trickle into a flood. At some point, it’s a death-spiral: As kids (often the best students) leave because schools are “notoriously inadequate,” the schools become even more notoriously inadequate, and funding — which is computed on a per-pupil basis — dries up. This, of course, encourages more parents to move their kids elsewhere, in a vicious cycle.

Does this mean the end of public education? No. But it does mean that the old model — which dates to the 19th Century, when schools were explicitly compared to factories — is at risk. Smarter educators will start thinking about how to update a 19th Century product to suit 21st Century realities. Less-smart educators will hunker down and fight change tooth and nail.
Who will win out in the end? Well, how many 19th Century business models do you see flourishing, here in the 21st?

The risk is to be embraced with enthusiasm.  I’ve been arguing for years that the very concept of “school” is completely and utterly outdated.  It’s inefficient, ineffective, and intellectually crippling.  Although there are many ominous signs on the horizon, there are a few bright rays of light shining as well, and one of them is the continued rapid growth of parents deciding to homeschool their children.

Homeschool or die: Part 563

What does a teacher have to do to lose her job?

A teacher tried to hire a gang member to assault her principal because she was being hassled about lies she told to the school, a disciplinary hearing has found. The high school teacher, whose name is suppressed, told a student she would “sort something out” for her if she arranged for her grandfather, who had gang connections, to confront the principal.

The teacher told a colleague she had arranged for the principal to be “capped”, which the colleague took to mean an injury to the knees. Despite her “unprofessional” actions and “serious misconduct”, the Teachers’ Council has given the teacher permission to return to the classroom after a disciplinary hearing last month.  The disciplinary tribunal heard the teacher also fabricated grades for
work not done by students, forged the head of department’s signature,
and lied about what classes she had taught.

It’s a refreshing reminder in the midst of all the Saint Teacher stories coming out of Connecticut that teachers are no saintlier, and on average a little less intelligent, than the norm.  One of the more powerful arguments in favor of homeschooling is that intelligent children will not be “taught” by half-educated women with IQs averaging two and three standard deviations below them.

Speaking of rhetoric

“Killer was home schooled” is a subtitle of an article in the Daily Telegraph.  “Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who killed his mother and 26 people at a primary school in Connecticut, was “very, very bright”, his aunt claimed as she disclosed his mother had chosen to home school him after “battling” education authorities.”

And yet, in the article itself, it refers to former classmates, his junior high school basketball team, the English class in which he read Steinbeck at 16, his membership in the high school computer club, how he sat alone at the table in the school lunchroom and on the school bus, and the way he graduated in 2010 from a high school with a yearbook.

This is not an accident.  A dialectic reading of the article will rapidly cause one to conclude that the bright, but mentally unstable kid should have been homeschooled from the start.  Instead, he was thrown into public school hell, socially rejected, and eventually took vengeance upon those serving as proxies for the individuals he perceived to have harmed him.  It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he had serious issues at school dating back to first or second grade; there is a reason he went after the little ones even if we don’t know what it is. 

But the intended rhetorical effect is for one to draw a connection between being homeschooled and being a murderous freak.  Which is deeply ironic, considering that homeschooling would help solve the problem from both ends, first by making it much less easy to slaughter large numbers of young children gathered in a single confined and defenseless place, and second by reducing the amount of abuse suffered by mentally unstable social rejects in their most formative years.

Homeschool or die, part 562

I imagine the latest school shooting will launch the Obama administration’s push for more useless gun control.  And yet, if they genuinely wanted to reduce the likelihood of the mass murder of schoolchildren, they would ban mass schooling.

CBS News is reporting that 27 people are dead, including 1420 students,
after a shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. The
gunman is among the dead.

Say what you will about homeschooling, but if your child is taught at home, he’s not going to be shot there by some disgruntled school employee, student, or parent.  And the idea that gun control laws will make any difference whatsoever with regards to this sort of thing is risible, given that it is already illegal to carry guns onto school property, to say nothing of shooting people there.

And this may be worth keeping in mind when the inevitable push for gun control begins: “The worst mass school murder in American history took place on May
18,1927 in Bath Township, Mich., when a former school board member set
off three bombs that killed 45 people.”

Obamateach and the post-college tax

After all, you didn’t build that university degree:

Student Loan debt in the U.S. recently crossed the $1 trillion mark,
with a good chunk of that owed to the U.S. government. In an attempt to
streamline the whole process, a soon-to-be-introduced bill would replace
the current system of debt collection with automatic payroll deductions
tied to the borrower’s income.

I wonder how long it will be before it will become illegal to pay for your own college, thus allowing Washington to tap directly into your paycheck perpetuity as compensation for the government investment in your K-16+ education.  We already have a working model for free education with the Obamacare model.  Obamateach is the obvious next step educational for a society moving rapidly Forward! into the 21st century.

The importance of IQ

As much as people slaver to denigrate and discredit it, the statistical fact of the matter is that IQ is actually more important than most people believe when it comes to certain types of success.  While it’s not necessarily a surprise that college grades and years of education strongly correlate with IQ, (which may be the cause of the common confusion of academic credentials with intelligence), it may be a surprise to learn that IQ is a better predictor of successful job performance than openness, extraversion, agreeableness, confidence, or even conscientiousness.

IQ surpasses any single Big Five personality factor in the prediction
of the two academic outcomes, college grades (r = .45) and years of
education (r = .55). Big Five conscientiousness is by far the best
personality predictor of grades (r = .22).…Conscientiousness predicts
job performance (r = .13; corrected r = .22) better than does any other
Big Five factor, but not as well as IQ does (r = .21; corrected r =
.55). The importance of IQ increases with job complexity, defined as the
information processing requirements of the job: cognitive skills are
more important for professors, scientists, and senior managers than for
semiskilled or unskilled laborers.…In contrast, the importance of
conscientiousness does not vary much with job complexity….

Now, we all know the brilliant guy who has wasted his 175 IQ by spending twenty years in search of the eternal buzz.  I do, anyhow, he used to live in my basement.  But such individuals are complete outliers, what matters more is the advantage that the moderately intelligent man with the 115 IQ has over the even more moderately intelligent 105 IQ guy.

For some reason, the discussion of IQ differences makes people uncomfortable; it doesn’t matter how obviously intelligent one is, people still find it offensive in a way that they never find a tall man being straightforward about his height is.  This is strange, because one can’t do much more about one’s intelligence than one can about one’s height.  One can, perhaps, attempt to make more efficient use of it, but then, a tall man can strive to avoid slouching as well.  Is it because we value IQ more than height, is it because it seems a more intrinsic element of ourselves, or is it merely that height is more readily observed by the average individual?

Regardless, the reality is that the more everyone realizes that intelligence, as measured by IQ, is merely a tool and a natural advantage little different than any other genetic gift, the better off everyone will be.  Being smart doesn’t make one any morally better or intrinsically wiser; the myopic foolishness of the cognitive elite is one of the greatest dangers that face humanity today.  But pretending that a potential danger does not exist is stupid and short-sighted, especially when one necessarily has to pretend that the antidote to that danger doesn’t exist as well.

If you don’t think it makes sense to treat a normal individual like a retard, then it should not be hard to understand that you cannot communicate with a brilliant individual as if he were a normal one.  And on the societal level, the goal should not be to try to make the retards normal or the normals brilliant, (such efforts are futile), but rather, to endeavor to teach each group of individuals wisdom and strong moral character to the best of their capacity to understand and apply it.  Even one conscientious and confident normal individual of good character can do wonders for correcting the ills caused by a gaggle of highly intelligent, evil-minded fools.

My question for Richard Dawkins

Slashdot is inviting interview questions.  Here is mine:  Given that a) a statistically significant minority of students cannot read or write at their grade levels, b) only a very small number of graduating high school students will ever go on to study science in college, and, c) there are already more science majors graduating than there are science-related jobs to employ them, why do you insist it is so important to teach evolution in schools?

Seeds of societal destruction

Desiderius, a commenter at HUS, draws an interesting connection between Rome’s destructive foreign policy and the U.S. university system:

The empire/Unis identify the best and brightest of the
tribes/flyover communities. They wow the parents with the grandeur of
Rome/Uni-degree caché. Parents send promising youth off to Rome/Unis.
They are indoctrinated with values hostile to the communities that
raised them.* In the Roman case, the now-mature youth were then returned
back to the tribes to sow discord, which they did in spades due to the
contempt they’d been trained to feel for the communities that raised
them and the values those communities held dear.

In the present case, when the economy is good, they just stay in the
big cities and live the life of Roissy. Bad economy -> the Roman case
becomes a more real possibility. I’ve seen some teachers like this,
although to be fair, also some teachers pushing back. We’ll see if the
result is just impotent discord. The alternatives range from Alaric to
Washington.

The irony is that the values of the tribes more closely approximated
the republican values that allowed Rome to rise in the first place than
the decadent ones that precipitated it’s fall. Likewise today. It is the
liberal values that have been corrupted.

* I’d argue in both cases violently less egalitarian, but I’m a little
original that way – suffice it to say in the present case that Yale Sex
Week wasn’t what the parents signed up for, or if that feels too
judgie/SoCon for you, one can peruse the syllabi for rampant
illiberalism, anti-semitism, radfem, anti-western, you name it. It’s
bad. I call it anti-humanism.

This is a cogent summary of one of the various downsides of the so-called meritocracy.  Another one is the way in which the destruction of the old WASP network on Wall Street and its strong sense of noblesse oblige led to the rapacious, mercenary culture that has devastated the American economy, created vast quantities of debt, and led to major malinvestment throughout the nation.

IQ and the Ivy League

One of the interesting things about the self-identified intelligent individuals of the cognitive elite is how they commonly demonstrate that the failure to think results in much the same consequences as the inability to think correctly.

Now, most graduates of Ivy League universities genuinely believe that most highly intelligent people attend Ivy League schools.  But in much the same way that atheists confuse a higher average intelligence with a larger quantity of intelligent individuals, they are confusing a concentration of intelligent individuals with the overall quantity.

Let’s assume that every single individual at an Ivy League school is
Mensa-qualified. That’s absurdly generous, of course, as anyone who has
ever been to an Ivy or conversed with more than a few Ivy League
graduates will know, but just to be conservative, we’ll assume that every single student enrolled at an Ivy posssses an IQ of 132+ and is therefore in the top 2 percent of intelligence. Now, note that the total Ivy
undergraduate enrollment is 59,561.

That is 0.32 percent of the 18,078,672
total U.S. undergraduate enrollment in 2010. That means, by even the most
generous and conservative estimate, (since not all Ivy undergrads are genuinely
Mensa-qualified and because the college-attending group has an average IQ a little above the 100 norm), there are at
least 5.25x MORE equally smart people, about 302,012, who are attending
state universities, community colleges, and other private colleges instead of Ivy League
universities.

I’d have to do a bit more research to come up with a more accurate number, but I would estimate that there are probably between 10x to 15x more smart people who did not attend an Ivy than did attend one.