The less tangible subjects of social and coping skills

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/02/09/educating-children-evolution-home-… Educating Our Children: The Evolution of Home Schooling

By Maggie Kerkman

| FoxNews.com

… “We’ve become more experimental about the way we offer education to children,” says David Chard, Dean of the School of Education and Human Development at Southern Methodist University. “Many parents are able to provide strong educational opportunity for kids,” he added.

But it’s not all about reading, writing and arithmetic. Chard said he worries home schooled students may be lacking in less tangible subjects, things like developing social or coping skills.

It amazes and amuses me that someone as knowledgeable about education as Mr. Chard and others are so concerned about homeschoolers developing social and coping skills outside of an established school. The questions that come to mind are:

Why would anyone assume that homeschoolers tend to be anti-social?

How do schools provide instruction in social and coping skills- especially in ways that parents cannot?

How did people manage to learn social and coping skills before public education came along?

Do schools actually provide real life socialization, or is the socio-economic and age segregated dynamic of the school artificial and thus not really providing the best quality of socialization opportunities?

Have schools been proven, by the quality of their graduates, to be the best way for young people to learn social and coping skills?

It seems no matter how positive the article about home education, they always have to throw the S-word (inside homeschool joke) in, which IMO makes them look rather ignorant. As I have asked these questions many times in real life of people who have expressed this concern, and have yet to receive a sensible answer, I thought I’d pose it here at SI.