Cyber-Social: Home School or Home Fool?

I’ve always said that I would home school my kids, which is an easy thing for me to say
considering my only “kid” is a feline. In proclaiming this future plan, I would often be met
by responses like “But how will your children become socialized? How will they learn to act like
normal people?” I would say, “They won’t. That’s actually the whole point.” Now that I am 27 and
still have a hard time imagining my future self as
a stay-at-home mom (or any kind of mom for that matter), I can recognize how lofty a goal that home-schooling thing might be.

None-the-less, in my home-schooling fantasy, my children would be provided with a unique
learning environment where they could work at their own pace, free from the repressive regimes that so often dominated my own private and public educational experiences.

Oh course, they would still join ballet, or fencing, or knitting club, or mathletes. They would still have a community of friends outside of me.

So I suppose that is where I begin to form my view of online education. I mean, of course we
can make any individual course as inclusive and community-based or as cold and isolating as
we can make any face-to-face course, based on a plethora of variables (some within the control of the instructor and some beyond).

But if what we’re really talking about is student retention and degree completion, I am reluctant to believe that
the presence or absence of community-focused
educational practices will be the sole deciding factor.

We know that successful students need community (see Sharon Kleinman, Richard S. Ascough, Arleen R. Bejerano, Terre H. Allen), but using this fact to chastise
the online educational system assumes that students do not already have community. When I was in film school, the bulk of my friends came from an enivironmentalist
group, not fromthe almost-all-male cohort of future Tarantino’s I took classes with. And despite the diversity
of our majors my enviro-friends and I studied together, supported each other, and helped one another with both school projects and more personal matters.

For me, the most important part of college with getting out of the neighborhood I
grew up in; a place where there were no enviro-groups to join up with. I needed to
learn about different lifestyles and divergent worldviews. That is what I needed and
that is what going away to college did for me.

But not everybody needs that. Some people are extremely close with their families
and want to stay with them. Some people already have all the community they need
right where they are. And some people go away to college and never leave their
dormrooms, never forming community bonds despite constant exposure to face-to-
face learning environments.

So in the words of Craig Gingrich Phibrook, “I’m gonna go with Sedgwick on this one: ‘People
are different.’” Although I do believe that we can and should continue to shape and improve
both online and face-to-face educational methods, using them to informone another,
I also believe that we need check some of our assumptions at the door.

And my possible future vegan, home-schooled, mathlete kids will probably grow up
to be corporate lawyers anyway. That’s the way the cookie often crumbles.