This from Happy Homeschooler Joanne Davidson, is good:

The issue I really want to focus on, though, is the level of acceptance that bullying, teasing and related behaviors that demonstrate poor character are 1) expected 2) normal and 3) demand early and repeated exposure to by our youngest citizens.

Public schools are in a unique situation. They provide an ever increasing program of diversity training while at the same time tolerating a high level of teasing and bullying. IMO and IME, institutional learning enviornments breed and foster the kind of climate that diversity training rallies to combat. At the same time, talk to almost any educator or parent who has (or has been) a child of the system, and you will hear version after version of "kids will be kids". The transalation is "You can't stop all teasing, you need to accept that it's going to happen." The fact that teasing and bullying happens at schools is given as an argument that our children *should* attend.

So … to sum up my poorly communicated incredulity: teasing and bullying happens. We have diversity training to protect certain politicalized special interests. But we will honor our children's needs to behave as they do in under-supervised packs. And not only is this a good thing, you need to throw your children into the mix at an early age.

And now beside that, from the USA, put this from the UK:

Children as young as 10 are being robbed of their childhood by pressure to copy scantily clad pop stars such as Kylie Minogue, the leader of a teaching union said yesterday.

Jim O'Neill, chairman of the Professional Association of Teachers, argued that primary school pupils were losing their innocence because they were bombarded with lewd images and exposed to inappropriate storylines and bad language on television programmes before the 9pm watershed.

So I guess children oughtn't really to live at home at all. All that mind rotting television. They should all be packed off to boarding schools at seven, there to be protected from the menace of Kylie.

But what if all that pressure to emulate Kylie comes not so much from Kylie herself as from those "under-supervised packs" that Joanne Davidson talks about?

One of the pleasures of doing this blog is that I am starting to meet quite a few homeschooled, home-edded, home-raised children, and to pay attention when I do meet them. And I can tell you that the home-thinged children whom I've been getting to know (a) get "pressure" from their parents that is much less frantic and antagonistic, to the point where it hardly seems like pressure at all, because the matter is settled between the children and the parents, day in day out, without third parties piling in with other agendas for six hours every day, and (b) they don't get pressure from feral-gang peer groups. They do, however, (c) go out and make friends as and when they feel the need. The idea that home-schooled children don't know how to socialise is, in my experience of socialising with them and on the basis of what they say about their lives, tosh.

The difference is that the very lives of these children are not ruled by the aggregate of their friends' opinions.