Common Objections to Homeschooling

2. Children in public schools are able to meet, and get to know, many children very different from themselves. If they didn't go to public school, how would this happen?

The first part of the answer to this question has to be that it very rarely happens in public schools. Except in very small schools, of which there are few, and which tend to be one-class schools anyway, children in public schools, other than a few top athletes, have very little contact with others different from themselves, and less and less as they rise through the grades. In most large schools the children are tracked, i.e., the college track, the business track, the vocational track. Even within each major track there may be subgroupings. Large schools may often have a half-dozen or more tracks. Students in one track go to one group of classes, students in another track go to others. Very rarely will students from different tracks find themselves in the same class. But - and here is the main point - study after study has shown that these tracks correlate perfectly with family income and social status: the richest or most socially prominent kids in the top track, the next richest in the next, and so on down to the poorest kids in the bottom track.

In theory, children are assigned to these tracks according to their school abilities. In practice, children are put in tracks almost as soon as they enter school, long before they have had time to show what abilities they may have. Once put in a track, few children ever escape from it. A Chicago second grade teacher once told me that in her bottom-track class of poor non-white children were two or three who were exceptionally good at schoolwork. Since they learned, quickly and well, everything she was supposed to be teaching them, she gave them A's. Soon after she had submitted her first grades, the principal called her in, and asked why she had given A's to some of her students. She explained that these children were very bright and had done all the work. He ordered her to lower their grades, saying that if they had been capable of getting A's they wouldn't have been put in the lowest track. But, as she found upon checking, they had been put into this lowest track almost as soon as they had entered school.

Even where the schools do not track children by classes, the teachers are almost certain to track them within their classes. In Freedom and Beyond I gave this example:

An even more horrifying example of the way this discrimination works can be found in the article "Student Social Class and Teacher Expectation: The Self-fulfilling Prophecy in Ghetto Education," by Ray Rist, in the August 1970 issue of the Harvard Educational Review. The kindergarten teacher described, after only eight days of school, and entirely on the basis of appearance, dress, manners, in short, "middle classness", divided her class into three tracks by seating them at three separate tables, which remained fixed for the rest of the year. One of these tables got virtually all of her teaching, attention, and support; the other two were increasingly ignored except when the teacher told them to do something or commented unfavorably on what they did. Worse yet, the children at the favored table were allowed and encouraged to make fun of the children at the other two tables, and to boss them around.

Rist followed these children through three years of school, and reported, first, that these children's first and second grade teachers also tracked by tables within their classes, and secondly, that only one of the children assigned in kindergarten to one of the two bottom tables ever made it later to a favored table. And the odds are very good that most elementary school classes have a kind of caste system in action. Even in small and selective private schools, I found that many of my fellow teachers were quick to label some children "good" and others "bad", often on the basis of appearance, and that children once labeled "bad" found it almost impossible to get that label changed.

Enough has been written about class and racial conflict in schools, above all in high schools, so that I don't want to add much to it here. Where different races are integrated in schools, even after many years, this usually begins to break down around third grade, if not even sooner. From fifth grade on, in their social lives, children are almost completely separated into racial groups, which become more and more hostile as the children grow older. Even in one-race schools, white or nonwhite, there is class separation, class contempt, and class conflict. Few friendships are made across such lines, and the increasing violence in our high schools arises almost entirely from conflicts between such groups.

So the idea that schools mix together in happy groups children from widely differing backgrounds is for the most part simply not true. The question remains, how would children meet other children from different backgrounds if they did not go to school? I don't know. While the numbers of such children remain small, this will be difficult. But as the numbers of such children grow, there will be more places for them to go and more things for them to do that are not based in school. We can certainly hope, and may to some extent be able to arrange, that in these places children from different backgrounds may be more mixed together. Also, people who teach their children at home already tend to think of themselves as something of an extended family, and using the Directory in Growing without Schooling, write each other letters, visit each other when they can, have local meetings, and so on. I hope this will remain true as more working-class and non-white families begin to unschool their children, and it well may; people who feel this kind of affection and trust in their own children tend to feel a strong bond with others who feel the same.