What About Socialization?

Review a summary of some of the research concerning homeschooling and socialization. 

Consult one of the best-compiled lists of web articles on homeschooling and socialization.

Visit the website of a homeschooled teenager and read what she has to say about socialization. 

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One question that is always raised eventually when discussing homeschooling is, "What about socialization?" Even though there are examples of famous, successful people who were educated at home--Thomas Edison, C.S. Lewis, and Agatha Christie, for example--there is often a commonly-held stereotype that homeschooled children are shy and isolated from the real world. Since John Dewey's idea that public school would be the great equalizer in our society, people often assume that children will not be able to learn how to function successfully in society unless they proceed through the usual public school experience.   

Research, however, has generally concluded just the opposite. Roland Meighan, from the University of Nottingham School of Education, says, "...research demonstrates that [home-educated] children are usually superior to their school-attending peers in social skills, social maturity, emotional stability, academic achievement, personal confidence, communication skills and other aspects" (Meighan 275).

Meighan, a practicing teacher, found that after researching homeschooling, he had to revise his own views of education, including views on socialization, such as that homeschooling:

• provided an environment in which students who'd had bad school experiences could recover well,

• tended to be more flexible in nature, and students grew up to more flexible adults,

• tended to accommodate non-sexist education better,

• was less susceptible to peer dependency, and

• often modeled cooperative and democratic learning methods (Meighan 282).

He concluded that, as long as homeschoolers don't get too narrowly focused in their curriculum choices, "[i]t is actually hard for a school as currently organized to match an alert, organised and energetic family. Only a few schools ever get near it, as I was able to observe as I went from studying home-educating families to supervising students in school and back again for over 10 years" (Meighan 282).