Tuesday 23 April 2013

Another myth in British home education; there is no evidence to show that socialisation is a problem for home educated children




The question of socialisation always rears its head in any discussion between home educators and  those who send their children to school. It is often asserted by home educators that there is no reason to think that their children are any less socialised than those at school, but this is not really true.

There is a bit of a difficulty when discussing socialisation of children. Parents naturally tend to think that their own kids are well adjusted and sociable. They typically think this, even if their offspring are lonely psychopaths about to carry out a massacre at the local high school. Needless to say, if anybody asks me about my own child, I will claim that she is clever, popular and well balanced. There is no reason to suppose that this is true; it is just what parents think about their own  kids. We must take home educating parents statements about sociability with a grain of salt. There is anecdotal evidence on the other side, of course. Many teachers and lecturers say that the home educated children they come into contact with are strange and do not fit in. We must treat these suggestions too with some scepticism , because teachers are not unbiased; many of them disapprove of home education and may not like the confident air that some home educated children have. Is there any objective evidence to which we can turn? Fortunately, there is; although it is not conclusive.

I am not a great fan of Paula Rothermel’s work, but she did carry out some tests on the social skills of home educated children. The results were surprising and not generally known among home educating parents. Bearing in mind that the samples were small and must be treated with caution, what was discovered? Rothermel used two different Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaires and these gave differing results. One showed that the home educated children had social skills as good as those of children at school; the other diagnosed many problems with the home educated children. What sort of problems? Perhaps we should let Rothermel’s words speak for themselves. She found that, ‘ Theft amongst the home-educated boys was substantially higher than for the schoolchildren’ She also discovered that, ‘the home-educated children here emerged as mostly 'Abnormal' in terms of their 'Prosocial Behaviour'.’ and also, ‘Socially, the SDQ found 61% of the home-educated children to exhibit 'abnormal' social behaviour,’.

These are quite disturbing findings, but they are not the only conclusion that Rothermel reached. Home educated girls in particular seemed prone to difficulties in socialisation. For example:

‘the home-educated sample demonstrated more signs of aggressive behaviours than the schoolchildren from the Rutter et al study, particularly for home-educated girls where aggressiveness was at 22.7% as opposed to 5.3% for Rutter's girls’



‘A comparison with the home-educated sample's data and that provided by Ekblad (1990) relating to previous studies, revealed that the home-educated children were more aggressive than the norm and that the girls' levels of anxiety was higher than those found in other studies.’


None of this is of course conclusive and I have mentioned elsewhere my reservations about both the size of the samples used and the methods for selecting them. Never the less, it remains the fact that in the only professional evaluation of the socialisation of home educated children in this country, serious problems were found. As I said earlier, one test found these problems and the other did not, which means that the question remains open. It is however not reasonable to claim, as many home educators do, that there is no reason to think that the socialisation of home educated children is any worse than that of those at school. There is reason to think this so, but the evidence is not conclusive.

10 comments:

  1. 'Many teachers and lecturers say that the home educated children they come into contact with are strange and do not fit in.'

    Many that you know? Many that I know are impressed by how well HE kids returning to school or entering college do. Perhaps we know a different group of teachers and college lecturers?

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  2. If the research is to be believed, then it could easily be a reflection of the number of children whose parents delay school or choose to HE because of what turn out to be ASD characteristics.

    Pro-social behaviour would certainly be something which a child with ASD would struggle with. Especially in a school setting.

    Fortunately, my child with ASD went to college at 16 with great social skills and is now doing very well. This is due to her having learned her social skills in appropriate settings, ie outside schools.

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  3. 'Many that you know? Many that I know are impressed by how well HE kids returning to school or entering college do. Perhaps we know a different group of teachers and college lecturers?'

    I have known some personally, but I am thinking about forums and lists where teachers hang out. Home education comes up from time to time and there are often comments of this sort. As I say, it is purely anecdotal and i do not treat it any more seriously than I do the claims of parents.

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  4. Can I ask what the difference between aggressive and assertive behaviour is in these tests? Because girls who are being home educated don't have the pressure to fit in with the herd and so, in my experience, seem to develop into quite strong characters.

    Otherwise, I'd totally agree with anonymous at 04-58. Rothermel et all assume that home educated children are outside the norm because they are HE. My experience is that a lot of them are being HE because they are outside the norm and that their social skills may not be brilliant, but they're developing better than they did when they were AT school.

    I wouldn't base my impressions of teachers on forums and lists where they hang out any more than I'd want anyone to base their impressions of home educators on what they read on this blog. All I can be sure is that we still regularly see several of the teachers who had the memorable experience of having my 2 in their classes and they are unanimous that home education suits them far better than school did and impressed by the growth in their confidence and in the knowledge that the pair of show offs can't resist demonstrating. For once, teachers and parents are in total agreement. School doesn't fit everyone. Nor does HE. That's the problem with these pesky humans that not only persist in being different but keep changing throughout their lives!

    Atb
    Anne

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  5. Well, you mean the one comment by the silly man at the union facebook page which was discussed here a few years ago. I frequent teachers' forums and haven't seen such things very often. When they do appear, it is often a comment made out of ignorance or bias.

    'As I say, it is purely anecdotal and i do not treat it any more seriously than I do the claims of parents.'

    It hardly seems worthy of a blog post then.

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  6. 'It hardly seems worthy of a blog post then.'

    You may not think so, but socialisation is the one subject which always seems to come up whenever home education is being discussed. When I was interviewed on the wireless a few weeks ago, it was inevitable that socialisation should be asked about. Since many home educating parents claim that this is not a problem, I thought that it was worth seeing what somebody sympathetic to home education had found out about it.

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  7. ' Because girls who are being home educated don't have the pressure to fit in with the herd and so, in my experience, seem to develop into quite strong characters.'

    Quite true, but if we are going to say that home educated children have social skills as good as those of school children, then we have to use the same way of measuring those skills. Otherwise, we will say, 'Oh it does not matter that home educated boys steal more than those at school; they have stronger characters and should not be bound by the same petty rules as others'!

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    Replies
    1. Perhaps I didn't put it clearly enough, Simon. Sometimes, boys behaviour is judged as assertive when girls who are exhibiting the same behaviour are called aggressive.

      There is a part of society that still sees women as more passive than men (and can't have been hanging out here), so I wondered if you knew how they'd decided what constituted aggressive behaviour.

      I don't think I've ever said that home educated children have social skills as good as those of school children. I'd be daft to, because the social skills required to survive in school are very different to the ones needed to survive in the adult world and it's a question of which skills are appropriate for which situation, not which are 'best'.

      I can see that people would find children who thought for themselves rather than following fashion and politically correct thought and had no automatic deference towards adults very disconcerting and possibly unwelcome if they were running an educational system that depended on passive consumers and everyone going in the same direction at the same speed and at the same time.

      I think you mentioned that people don't realise that your Simone was home educated. That seems to suggest that the social skills she learned during home education allowed her to flourish at first college and now, I hope, university, exactly as anonymous at 04-58's child is flourishing now.

      Atb
      Anne

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    2. Anne wrote:
      "Sometimes, boys behaviour is judged as assertive when girls who are exhibiting the same behaviour are called aggressive."

      I agree absolutely (and I'm a man); I've seen this sort of thing many times over my adult life (30+ years) and it doesn't seem to be getting better. Men can get away with being lads or go-getters, whereas a woman who exhibits the same behaviour is seen as a nag or pushy and aggressive.

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  8. "Sometimes, boys behaviour is judged as assertive when girls who are exhibiting the same behaviour are called aggressive."

    I wonder how the methods used in the study define aggression, since one of the other methods found that home educated children were more passive, rather than aggressive, than schooled children.

    The comparison involving theft was between school children in 1970 and home educated children in 1998 - not sure how this 28 year difference would affect our understanding of the results. I notice also that the home educated children scored significantly lower scores for lying, anxiety (boys) hyperactivity, nail biting, phobias, and tics and twitches.

    It would also be interesting to know if the school children groups included children with autism, as the HE group did. For anyone interested in further details, you can see the report here, http://pjrothermel.com/phd/9%20Social%20and%20Psychological%20Chapter.htm

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