Common Objections to Homeschooling
1. Since our countries are so large and our people are from so many different kinds of backgrounds (this was said most recently to me by a Canadian) don't we need some kind of social glue to make us stick together, to give us a sense of unity in spite of all our differences, and aren't compulsory public schools the easiest and best places to make this glue?
About needing the glue, he's absolutely right. We do need such a glue, certainly in big diverse countries like the U.S. and Canada, but also in much smaller and more tightly-knit countries, many of whom are also breaking apart under the stresses of modern life.
Right now, the main social glue we seem to have here in the U.S. is hatred of "enemy" countries. Except when briefly united in such hatred, far too many of us see our fellow-citizens, even those of our own color, religion, etc., only as our natural enemies and rightful prey, to do in if we can. Indeed, we insist that this way of looking at other people is actually a virtue, which we name "competition." This outlook may have worked fairly well when our country was young, nearly empty, and rich in natural resources, but not anymore. For our very survival, let alone health and happiness, we need a much stronger and better social glue than this.
Some kinds of community gathering places and activities might help us form this social glue. But not schools - not as long as they also have the job of sorting out the young into winners and losers, and preparing the losers for a lifetime of losing. These two jobs can't be done in the same place at the same time.
People are best able, and perhaps only able, to cross the many barriers of race, class, custom, and belief that divide them when they are able to share experiences that make them feel good. Only from these do they get a stronger sense of their own, and therefore other people's, uniqueness, dignity, and worth. But as long as schools have their present social tasks, they will not be able to give such experiences to most children. In fact, most of what happens in school makes children feel the exact opposite - stupid, incompetent, ashamed. Distrusting and despising themselves, they then try to make themselves feel a little better by finding others whom they can look down on even more - poorer children, children from other races, children who do less well in school.
Even if children do learn in school to despise, fear, and even hate children from other social groups, might they not hate them even more if they did not meet them in school? At least in school they see these other groups as real people. Without school, they would know them only as abstractions, bogeymen. This might sometimes be true, but only of those few children for whom the world outside of school was as dull, painful, humiliating, and threatening as school. Most children who learn without school, or who go only when they want to, grow up with a much stronger sense of their own dignity and worth, and therefore, with much less need to despise and hate others.
The important question, how can people learn to feel a stronger sense of kinship or common humanity with others who are different, is for me best answered by a story about John L. Sullivan, once the heavyweight prize fighting champion of the world. Late one afternoon he and a friend were riding standing up in a crowded New York City streetcar. At one stop, a burly young man got on who had had too much to drink. He swaggered down the center of the car, pushing people out of his way, and as he passed John L., gave him a heavy shove with his shoulder. John L. clutched a strap to keep from falling, but said nothing. As the young man went to the back of the car, John L.'s friend said to him, "Are you going to let him get away with that?" John L. shrugged and said, "Oh, I don't see why not." His friend became very indignant. "You're the heavyweight champion of the world," he said furiously. "You don't have to be so damned polite." To which John L. replied, "The heavyweight champion of the world can afford to be polite."
What we need to pull our countries more together are more people who can afford to be polite, and much more - kind, patient, generous, forgiving, and tolerant, able and willing, not just to stand people different from themselves, but to make an effort to understand them, to see the world through their eyes. These social virtues are not the kind that can be talked or preached or discussed or bribed or threatened into people. They are a kind of surplus, an overflowing, in people who have enough love and respect for themselves and therefore have some left over for others.