I had better start with a clarification of what homeschooling really means. Many people take the word homeschooling to mean a home classroom situation in which students have no contact with other children or the outside world. But why would homeschoolers want or need to isolate themselves in this way? Typical homeschoolers in fact meet people in a wide variety of ways, from sports to study groups to volunteer work. During my homeschooling, I took art classes, assisted with the local Shakespeare festival, led hikes on a nature preserve, belonged to a homeschoolers’ social group, and more--not to mention meeting kids who lived nearby, whose parents knew my parents, or who in some other way came into my life by chance. It was hardly a hermit’s existence.

Was it a protected one? In a way, yes. I was not hidden away from the world, sheltered from all cruelty, but I was kept out of the harsh school social scene in which kids, especially high-schoolers, must either sink or swim. School kids’ social lives are centralized, and so popularity is essential: if you are rejected in school, you have nowhere else to go. This gives the in crowd tremendous power. Since I made my friends here and there instead of having to fight for survival in that one setting, I was never at risk for the level of teasing and exclusion that takes place in schools. Some would say that this freedom from the in crowd’s power must harm a child by failing to prepare them for the harsh realities of life. I disagree.

Making children face relentless, inescapable peer pressure does not prepare them to face adult life: more often, it weakens and confuses them and teaches them to judge themselves by the opinions of others. They are too young to handle it. Would we make three-year-olds cross streets alone so they would learn to handle the realities of traffic? Would we send twelve-year-old girls to singles bars as preparation for the adult world in which men will hit on them? The pressures children encounter in school are equally beyond what they are ready for. If an eight-year-old is told day after day that he is stupid, a twelve-year-old that she is fat and ugly, a fifteen-year-old that he is a wimpy nerd, they will likely believe at some level that these judgments are true. And the child who is not rejected will likely fear it and devote herself to keeping up an image, knowing that if other children turn on her, she will have no way to get away from them. Some children are able to recognize the shallowness of the in crowd’s judgments and keep their self-confidence and sense of identity intact, but many others--including some with loving and supportive families--become insecure and lose track of what is right for them. I know far too many people to whom this has happened.

As a homeschooler, I was free to develop my interests and values fully without concern for whether they were fashionable or cool. By the time I graduated and began college, I knew who I was and what I believed in. With that knowledge came the ability to meet the college social scene with confidence and to weigh which concessions are worth making to the popular trend and which are not.

I won’t deny that in my first semester of living on campus, I have had to learn the customs, taboos, and expectations as I go. I have been playing the role of an anthropologist, learning a new culture by trial and error and observation, in a way that people who grew up in school culture do not need to do. Sometimes it is frustrating, but it is a temporary inconvenience, not a serious handicap. Already it is nearing an end; picking up the culture is not that hard.

And getting along before learning it is not that hard when one has social graces and the ability to coexist with other people who are different from oneself. I learned these skills in part from my family but also from the diverse group of friends I had as a homeschooler. My friends were, as I have said, from different settings, and they were also of all different ages. I was accustomed to spending time with all sorts of people who lived all sorts of lives, from mainstream teenagers to theater students to the middle-aged women who were my mother’s co-workers at a bookstore. I learned to accept others as they were and not try to push my own lifestyle on them; I never expected everyone to be like me. And from the adult friends I had and the time I spent in the adult world, I picked up the social graces that are unfamiliar to many young people but that make getting along with people of any age much easier and more pleasant--habits beyond mere please and thank you that show respect and acceptance, put people at ease, facilitate conversation, and make day-to-day interactions easy and comfortable.

Have these skills been enough to make everyone put aside all prejudices and preconceived notions and accept and understand me as I am? No. I knew from the first that they would not be, which is the main reason I am attempting to learn the college culture instead of ignoring it. Each time I learn a custom or taboo that differs from my habits, I decide whether to conform to it for the sake of being accepted or to reject it as too much in opposition to what I want or believe in. I conform with my clothing, wearing the fashionable neutral colors although in the past I have tended to wear bright ones. Clothes are not very important to me, so I may as well not stick out and have everyone notice my "weird" clothing instead of more important things about me. But I do not conform with the college tradition of drunkenness: I find the effects of alcohol very unpleasant (it makes me either cry or fall asleep) and am not willing to subject myself to them for the sake of fitting in. This has caused certain people to reject me, and I don’t care. I am old enough and sure enough of myself that I know there is nothing wrong with me if I don’t like to get drunk. Anyone who would reject me for that is not someone I’d want as a friend.

I have compromised, though, on my original habit of not drinking at all. I have found that in this culture it is too often misunderstood. If people see me turn down booze when everyone else is drinking, they assume all sorts of things: that I am morally against alcohol (false), that I am offended by drinking or cannot be comfortable with people who drink (also false), that my not drinking is part of an uptight, prudish outlook (false again). Once I realized this, I settled on a comfortable middle ground. Now, if everyone else is drinking, I take one beer and spend two hours drinking it along with lots of snacks. I don’t feel a thing and suffer nothing worse than a few empty calories, nobody mistakes me for a self-righteous prude, and we can all be comfortable with one another. As I said, I’m learning through trial and error.

I have yet to encounter the degree of peer pressure that takes place in high school, and I don’t believe I ever will. That brings me to one more reason why the school social scene is unnecessary: why should kids have to learn how to cope with something that they will never meet again after graduation? One way in which K-12 social life differs from that of college and the adult world is its lack of civility. In college and beyond, people are not so blatantly mean. The other difference is the way in which school kids are limited to one set of potential friends--or enemies--from whom they cannot escape. In college people move in many different circles that depend on their majors, interests, and other factors; even at the small college I attend, there is no central in crowd that can pronounce one a success or a failure. Once one leaves school altogether, one is even more free from the need to fit in. Where in the adult world is one forced to spend one’s time with a single group of people all fighting to get on top day after day as in school? The only place I can think of is jail. The next closest is a large business, but even if one must work for that company and no other, one can easily seek one’s friends elsewhere. Though one may make friends at work, the workplace is not designed to be the basis of one’s social life.

Why, then, do people believe that the high school experience is relevant to adult life? Surely I experienced something much closer to adult life as a homeschooler. Like adults, I made my friends here and there through a variety of shared experiences. Like adults, I was free to choose whom to associate with. And, as every adult should, I learned how to get along with other human beings without compromising who I am.