I guess they really aren’t there to socialize

I find this article interesting in a couple of different ways. A private school in Rhode Island has decided that talking will not be allowed in the cafeteria at lunchtime. Their reasoning is that there have been recent choking incidents and teachers cannot hear a child in distress if the lunchroom is loud.

First, it’s a wonder the school’s attorneys haven’t decided against lunchtime altogether because it creates the choking hazard in the first place. Or maybe there’s a middle ground to be found? Perhaps they could just serve smoothies with vitamin boosts to all the children for lunch.

Secondly, the most common question Mr. Ex says he gets about our decision to homeschool is “What about socialization?” This always amuses us because between playdates, homeschool co-ops, Cub Scouts, neighbor kids, sports and youth activities at church, we sometimes wish we could have a little less socialization. And I can remember being told countless times during the course of my twelve years of public schooling that we were “not there to socialize.”

“Ah,” they say, “but what about the bus rides and lunch time? Those are when friendships are made.” And yet some schools have decided that these times are not for socialization either. So when exactly are the kids getting this wonderful thing called socialization?

I am a product of a traditional classroom education. I have attended great schools and mediocre schools and had great teachers and mediocre teachers. I made many friends and enjoyed many wonderful opportunities and experiences. But I do not buy that the purpose of a traditional school setting is to socialize children. It is to teach many students the same material at the same time. If our family has the opportunity to give our children a more individualized, private education with an extremely low teacher to student ratio, what’s wrong with that? We like to think of ourselves as a very exclusive private academy. We follow the classical model of education, relying on the trivium to guide the rigor of our studies, just as Aristotle did with Alexander the Great. We have lots of fun with field trips and projects and experiments. But we are not here to socialize. We are here to learn.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 9:21 am and is filed under Education and Academia, Personal Blather, Homeschooling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.