Sometimes when families are considering homeschooling they get the question, “but what about socialization?” The argument is that schooling is where children become socialized, and taking them out of school will deny them that opportunity. There are many problems with this argument, of which I’ll quickly highlight three of them.
The first problem is that there is very little socialization that happens at school. There is lots of socialization that may happen around school (e.g., coming to school, in between classes, lunch, extracurriculars, leaving school), but schooling is about schooling, and schooling is decidedly anti-socialization. In school, students are expected to be good students, which means not socialization with one another.
If this is socialization, schooling is problematic.
The second problem is that the practices and structures of schooling promote behaviors that are anti-social. Schooling is about testing, grading, and ranking students against one another. It is a race to the top where there is limited room for winners, but there is plenty of room for losers everywhere below the top. In fact, you cannot have winners if you don’t have losers in a competitive game—one must create losers to anoint winners. What schools squander in their game of pitting students against each other or against arbitrary standards is the opportunity to promote empathy, collaboration, conflict resolution, self-regulation, teamwork, and a sense of self-efficacy.
The third problem is that schools operate nothing like society, at least the functional parts of society that uplift people and allow them to lead meaningful lives. So the behaviors one must develop to do well in schooling do not translate over to broader society. For example, in broader society we should be able to interact with people old and young. In schools students are typically stuck in rooms with children all the same age. In broader society we should be able to interact with people who are different than us. Schools literally wall children off fro those who are different than them: children not their age, adults, people with learning differences, and people outside of their segregated school zones. Schools limit students’ universe of daytime interactions to same-aged students from largely homogenous communities in a competitive atmosphere.
So what does this have to do with my daily blog about Abrome during this pandemic year? Three of the seven Learners in my cell listed some form of socialization on their daily intentions: get to know people, hang out, and maybe talk to [a specific Learner].
Some Learners are eating pecans while other Learners are deep in conversation.
When all the Learners had arrived I began the morning meeting with a series of questions that would allow me to get to know them better, and that would help them better know each other. The most serious question was ‘how do you want to be treated at Abrome?’ The responses centered around respectfully, fairly, and kindly. After the morning meeting we made our way back to the lake where two Learners positioned themselves on the dock, two Learners went looking for pecans to harvest, and two Learners began shoveling holes in the sandy beach. The Learner who had intended to ‘get to know people’ then made her way to the dock to be around the two Learners who positioned themselves there, including the Learner who had an intention to ‘maybe talk to [the Learner who joined them on the dock].’ I was not close enough to observe how the conversations began, but soon enough they were all engaged in “awesome conversations” as one Learner later relayed to me.
The older Learners came back to the beach after collecting pecans and began breaking them open and eating them. I appreciated that they kept their masks on while doing so, lifting them just slightly to take in a pecan at any given time. They offered me one and I ate it, and they tasted just like they do when I buy them from the bulk section of the grocery store. As I walked away they continued to ‘hang out,’ which was the intention of one of the Learners.
The two younger Learners continued to dig their holes as deep as they could, which was complicated by the lake pushing sand back into their holes. One of the older Learners reminded one of them to wear their shoes if they were going to dig with the shovel, or to dig from their knees, practices that we highlighted at the beginning of the day when that Learner arrived with shovels. When the younger Learners tired of the digging, the older Learners asked if they could borrow the shovels to dig a large hole that would double as a hot tub. While most of this part of west Austin is a tiny sliver of topsoil on top of limestone, they happened to find a spot that was mostly sand and they dug quite deep until they ran out of energy. It was a great workout and a great bonding experience for them. Note: all Learners refilled their holes by the end of the day.
While the Learners were digging, they were stacking the sand on a pile next to the hole. The two younger Learners found it fun to run through the pile in between each shovel of sand was moved. The older Learner who was digging patiently waited each time to make sure that the Learners cleared out of the space he was throwing the sand so that he did not hurt one of the younger Learners. The six-year-old Learner recognized that their fun was creating a minor inconvenience for someone else, even though the older Learner was okay with the inconvenience. In a show of self-regulation and leadership, the younger Learner decided that it was best to simply stop the inconvenience and turned to the other Learner and said, “we’re making the process slower for [the Learner who was digging], let’s stop.”
These two friends decided to take a cold dip.
Toward the end of the day, the two Learners who wanted to be more social decided they wanted to jump in the lake. It was a cold plunge in the lake, but they did it together, so that took away some of the sting of the cold water. I decided that I should take advantage of jumping in the lake, as well, considering that there may not be many more days of swimming left as we go deeper into the fall. I chose not to touch the cold water to prevent myself from changing my mind, and jumped in from the roof of the dock for good measure. It was really cold.
By the afternoon roundup it seemed that everyone was really happy with how the day played out. Although we are operating in small, physically distant, age-mixed cells during the pandemic, which limits the number of people each Learner can interact with each day (because pandemic), it would be absurd to argue that they would have more opportunities for socialization in a conventional setting, whether that setting was online during the pandemic, in-person during the pandemic, or in-person during non-pandemic times. At Abrome the process of socialization is not directed; it is organic, in an anti-oppressive, consensus based community that centers the needs of each Learner.
But what about socialization?