The home school movement assumes since they see no harm in isolating children for years at a time teaching them at home, home schooling is perfectly harmless. They incorrectly assume since their peer social interaction seemed to have no impact on their lives, peer social skills are something humans are born with rather than acquired. Their perceived advantages are not advantages when looked at in depth. These advantages are a mirage or something that they never really achieve by home schooling their children.
Isolating children hurts them and hurts them for life. They never over come the shortchanging they get from growing up isolated from daily peer social contact. Home schooling is a national tragedy especially since so many classroom educated people can't relate to the harm it does. They can't think back in their minds as to what a horrible experience it was growing up alone and later in life having to face peers without the social skills they would easily have acquired had they not be incarcerated at home for so many years. Advocates of home school simply can't relate to how bad the isolating factor in home schooling is. For further discussion, please read the following information.
Governor Ted Kulongoski Tuesday, January 13, 2009
OREGON STATE CAPITOL Salem, OR 97310
RE: Most Home Schools are Good Situations without Problems like Bad HS’s have—what parents are taught to think is true
Governor Ted Kulongoski:
When you know from talking to the ever so professional HS lobbyists who were classroom educated and are so sincere, understanding, and wonderfully informed on HS, and you ask them about me. “As they say in our world, ‘Well if this guy had a good home school, he wouldn’t be so against it, would he? But most all of our HS kids today are perfectly happy and productive home schoolers. So if I were you, I wouldn’t pay attention to Michael Shearer. He obviously doesn’t realize he was one of a rare few bad HS kids.’”
As a not so strong of a personality governor, you love hearing from what millions of parents have hired this lobbyist to tell governors, and this means you mistakenly assume you are off the hook or at least you incorrectly think Oregon is. What I need to do is stop screwing around and take Oregon to court.
When you read my HS material or have staff brief you on it, you assume I’m talking about a rare few HS children but any system like this is going to have some kids that get hurt, right? So this is justified collateral damage. In an imperfect world some folk will get hurt and they don’t matter, right? Children are getting killed in Gaza right now and this maybe worse but that doesn’t justify this HS ruining of lives.
No child should have to go through the problems HS caused me as all HS children today are experiencing because some adults can’t see the harm and are too stupid to take advice from “lobbyist” that know the truth.
So Oregon government doesn’t need to disturb the HS movement and cause a lot of trouble when you wonder how you can spread yourself more thin as it is. This is certainly a good way to reason about the ruining of HS kids innocent lives not being as important as your personal needs, right? A good governor can hire all the people he needs in order to get the work done. So I don’t see what the problem is.
There are two areas in HS that are invisible to adults. HS kids face these things every day and they affect them for life. The general area is that hundreds of things that we can tell you about you can grasp 3% when I need a100% grasp from you for you to realize the powerful impact these things have on HS kids and hurt them for life. The HS child automatically sees the 100%. But the HS kid is too little to realize that his or her parents can’t see these things and if I can’t tell adults what they are at 57 neither can kids.
This is why this method is hard to convince parents it is wrong without being able to make them see why these things are a big deal to children and nothing to the ignorant stupid idiot adults. The problem here is that you can’t see things the way a HS child can and this means the harm or shortchanging in social skills mean nothing to you.
As a HS child I had this huge vision of why HS was the dumbest thing any parent could do, but I never really grasped the fact that my parents didn’t know about any of this stuff. In 1991 I still didn’t know adults were oblivious to a whole world of knowledge they can’t even see when I try to tell them now at 57. Understanding brainwashed HS parents and how they think what I know exists doesn’t exist, is mind boggling to me.
Also every home school parent has different opinions about the value of HS. What they think about HS is irrelevant since they aren’t the ones being hurt by this dysfunctional delusional incompetent so called educating method. If you listen to the parents and think you have to justify ending HS in Oregon to each and every one, you can only throw up your hands in utter despair. I refuse to let anyone confuse me on HS. Without help from me how do government people know what to do when they aren’t informed about home school since there is no published material to study besides mine.
If Oregon government had taken me serious in 1991, I would have ironed out thousands of problems for you people who seem to think HS is nothing but a fun unstructured lazy kind of school for kids and you don’t have an obligation to get serious about the child abuse you are so willing and able to ignore for conveniency and for the rich and lofty betterment for your selfish lives. This sounds mean doesn’t it?
I think refusing to investigate my thinking on HS the last 17 years is about as goddamned mean as you can possible be to HS kids and to me. Are we connecting here yet?
When I’m about 1,000% sure you think the same way as Governor Roberts did in 1991 and you have had no reason to change your mind since I’m a fucking failure in presenting what this HS business is about, then you are the first blood to act and not me. I can be as cruel to you in what I say to you as your actions have been to me, right?
The second type of invisibility is invisible to current HS kids to some extent, to parents, to friends and to relatives who believe HS is good, and invisible to me for the most part. Most of what I know about HS doesn’t come from my experience which is irrelevant to you. If I had not research home school, this second type of invisibility might still be invisible to me. This is why you can’t drill HS kids about HS and expect them to know what I know.
I know what to look for in the HSs I’ve seen. You might be amazed that I would have so much to point out that you missed entirely and don’t have a clue because you can’t remember what I point out afterward. I can see lots of problems observing HS kids in their homes as I have over a couple hours in giving insurance presentations to parents.
I can gather statistics on hours HS kids are alone and time with stranger peers and if there are any real peer friends, then I will know what these statistic mean to the HS kids but my statistics mean nothing to the parents who are utterly hopeless in seeing the harm. With the statistics I have a better picture of what is invisible to everyone else. But I don’t know from observing HS kids in this second invisibility situation just how bad off the HS kids are.
Most of what I have said about HS is in the second invisible area, and these are what the HS movement thinks are there best socialized HSs. In recently studying the best HSs it looks to me as though since they assume events offer socialization and socialization is a concept no one has explained to the HS leaders let alone the ignorant parents, apparently these children have no social time at these events and the events are at least a week apart which mean these peers are strangers peers which means they are worthless in building close relationships and peer social skills.
This means there are no good HSs. None of them offer a normal opportunity to have effective building of peer social skills and advanced peer relationships.
No, I have always been talking about the first bad 90% of HSs. I firmly believe the remaining 10% of HS that live in the country, have no access to peers unless someone drives them to a location with kids, and the parents don’t want their kids to be influenced in evil ways by peers with bad habits, deserve protection from the state by making all HS’s illegal. There is no such thing as a good HS and certainly there is no reason why any child should be kept out of a classroom school.
Assuming the 90% of HSs’ were perfectly harmless HSs, the state would still realize no kid should have his options in life cut back because his or her parents were so stupid they kept them at home instead of sending them to school. The reality of the real world is that 100% of home schoolers in the world today are being hurt drastically shortchanged in ways that can’t ever be justified by mentally stable, responsible, intelligent HS leaders and government officials.
Norma Paulus thought that I had no right to interfere with the Oregon government because I didn’t work for and represent a large association and was paid as a lobbyist. Well, I don’t know anything about this. I don’t give a damn about your ways of dealing with Mr. Public ON OTHER UNIMPORTANT ISSUES. But this is an extremely important issue or I would never have told government about it.
But it is clear to me for the last 17 years you have done nothing to take advantage of my contribution to the complex problems in this issue that has invisible spots that allows you folk to mistakenly think you can find out form current home school kids and parents what goes on in HS even though you are too sloppy to find out what information the parents think they know when they are unaware of their own ignorance. The parents will only tell you HS is a good idea. This is bullshit. Everything HS parents answer will be designed to benefit them. Why can’t you people figure this out?
First my parents fucked me with HS for no reason to justify it. And when I try to help government see the fucking I got, all you government nerds want to do is do nothing. You have even refused to recognize a problem of serious proportions exists. Your lack of action against the HS movement is alarming. And you pretend to be interested in my letters that offer almost nothing compared to what I should have been doing assisting your government. Oregon Government is so utterly corrupt--officials are motivated by intense selfish consideration for what’s-in-it for you personally.
If HS parents could somehow someday grasp what their children are missing out on in HS, they would vigorously, energetically, dynamically, forcefully, enthusiastically praise me for taking the initiative to go after the goddamned Oregon state government and nail them to the floor until we have a meeting of the minds. Right now I’m the best friend every HS parent in the world has. On the other hand, people who are only concerned about covering their ass, are the worst enemies to these deceived, twisted brainwashed HS parents. How do you live with yourself considering the sins you commit every day against humanity.
I never minded facing reality. I’m so pleased to be free of any Mickey Mouse belief system called a religion. I feel a new lease of life living in harmony with the world as it is. And I have no trouble offering this insight to couch potatoes. I hope you can accept your reality when others offer you this real world truth.
Doing what I have done for about 18 years in seeking to help you folk is good for Democracy-- of the people and by the people. If all your government experience means you can only do it the government way, then God help you.
I had a problem with your first governor campaign staff managers, and I needed to talk over their heads, but I guess politicians have no obligation to volunteers and you as the top dog in the campaign refused to diffuse the situation. It’s too bad you didn’t work in the real business world a few years. Then you wouldn’t make mistakes like you did in your first governor campaign.
Oregon government has ignored my assistance as the foremost authority on HS in the world today for so long the HS movement probably thinks they have it made, Just remember whatever they say about HS being good, positive, and the truth, is all irrelevant. They don’t represent the children. They represent the parents who fail to see the harm HS causes that is enormous and enough to justify making HS illegal.
Truly Yours,
Michael R. Shearer, Edited 1/15/09
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Edwin J. Feulner
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
2214 Massachusetts Ave. NE, Washington, DC 20077-7315
Re: All you need to know about Home Schooling
Dear Edwin Feulner:
Recently I sent some of my HS letters to your staff. They promised to get back to me but when they saw that I’m against HS they decided not to. You people are supposed to think things through and not be square as the HS movement leaders and the parents themselves have degenerated into being.
The most important thing that is devastating to the HS method is something that you must really want to know about and I can’t explain it in writing. But I can describe the parameters and you have to imagine the rest.
Because the classroom educated HS parents reasons that if their mind has a blank about the severe harm and short changing in social life all HS kids experience, they want to believe this most dominant aspect to the HS child, doesn’t exist. If this isolating feature of HS was easy for parents to see, HS would be the thing that doesn’t exist, wouldn’t it?
The harm from a lonely childhood existed for me as plain as day--like the nose on my face or the legs connected to my hips. When I come along and testify that this harmful feature of HS exists, it means the whole HS movement is wrong because I know it does exists. There are thousands of people who can tell HS parents, and they do tell them all the time that the harm exists. HS parents have no right to deny reality.
Whoever wrote your HS education for your online presentation were people who assume HS is harmless, very little peer socializing is required if any at all, and children don’t need to develop close peer relationships until they get out of school and into the work place. Every author of every pro-HS book assumes the isolating from peers all HS kids experience is harmless. HS is harmless and all you have to do is find advantages to it and you incorrectly think you have it made but this means you fail to see the most dominant harmful shortchanging that is an integral part of HS.
HS parents didn’t go to classroom schools to learn social skills or develop close peer relationships. It never occurred to them that being around the same peers all day 5 or 6 days a week at school plus a few hours after school at their homes. So taking into consideration their being oblivious to how they happened to learn their own social skills, many HS parents think that removing the peers at the classroom schools and then not having peers in the HS other than siblings makes no difference to the environment of HS kids.
HS parents incorrectly think being around the same peers every day has no impact on their lives. Therefore HS kids don’t need peers in their lives.
Obviously in the real world this little thing to HS parents but major difference to impact children makes all the difference in the world. But to naïve, uninformed, narrow minded HS parents such as mine were, having no peers in HS made no difference in my life to them. If it was an advantage to keep me away from the worldly, wicked, evil church school kids, I might have had positive and necessary negative experiences that would have prepared me for adult life as it does most classroom kids.
This leaves out the enjoyment I would have had as a child had I not been a recluse stuck at home for 8 years. Oh, yes my parents thought they were doing me a big favor without all the negative experiences they had in school. Of course they robbed me of all positive experiences that are so rewarding.
HS parents mistakenly think they don’t need peers for their HS kids’ social learning and they don’t want peer for their HS. HS parents can only incorrectly think in their twisted minds their children pick up bad things from evil peers. If this is a consideration, who is going to protect HS parents’ adult children from evil peers when the parents are dead and gone? This HS industry is fucked up from head to toe.
HS parents know that many people criticize HS for not teaching social skills. They know the government knows this so when they talk with officials they have an answer for everything and what they say is designed to shut up the officials. What HS parents say doesn’t necessarily match what HS parents believe. In other words the HS parents will lie their heads of to get rid of government officials who have no right to question their brilliant and often very wrong answers.
The Oregon government officials don’t give a damn whether or not children are being hurt by HS as long as the public doesn’t know about it. But if officials ask about the extreme and tragic isolating social environment which the officials see as an important consideration even though they are totally uninformed in behavioral science and have never read a word to inform themselves they pretend to care but hardly see lack social skills in HS kids as any big deal.
The HS parents will brag and brag about how many events per year they go to. They assume if their kids are at an event with other kids, they will interact and learn social skills form stranger peers which means no social skills learning is taking place. The HS parents refuse to admit these events are a week apart or much longer apart, and no quality social time is made available at any event. This means there is no socialization at these events. They may not see the same peers with events a week apart.
They incorrectly think if their kid goes to an event that meets once a week and their child makes eye contact with a peer across the room, this is more than enough socialization from that event. This is an exaggeration but it clearly shows their mentality toward their kids not experiencing productive socialization that will make up for the lack of contact with the same peers everyday.
At the end of your HS presentation on the web you quote Dr. Brain Ray. Brian Ray has a PhD in Theology. He has no expertise in this field. And yet in his recent published twisted HS book, WORLDWIDE GUIDE TO HOMESCHOOLING, he says HS kids don’t need peers to play with growing up to learn social skills. “(HS kids) know that solid social and emotional development is based on interaction with a variety of people and ages in many different settings, not on the stultified peer group setting of typical institutional schools.” P. 10.
I had adults who were living with us for many years--a married couple, two young men in their 30s and a woman who was 26 when she moved in. Having adults around to talk to didn’t fill the void. Although I still get along better with people twenty years older than me today. Who am I relating to now? You are probably many years older than me. Do you think this is dumb luck?
Brain Ray had 5 siblings to grow up with. He has no idea why I’m against HS. He never experienced only having a sister four years younger than me. Having several siblings to grow up with was good but this doesn’t mean HS is okay for large families. It’s an abnormal life for anyone. The advice I got from PhDs in behavioral science was clear peers are necessary because they relate at the same level. Brian Ray is just trying to sell his product by making up whatever he wants.
Ray talks about socialization as if it were a product that can be quantified and measured to compare HS kids with no social life at all and discover that the HS kids are far more socialized without peers, than classroom students. I hope to God you realize this man is no authority on HS. I was on a HS TOWN HALL TV show with Brian Ray.
I had been writing to the producer for months and then they put this show on for promoting HS. Brian Ray was the star of the show. I doubt if his typical reader has any knowledge to know everything Ray says is bullshit and can’t be trusted.
In the green room for this TOWN HALL show, I was sitting down talking with an elementary school principle who wasn’t a HS fan. Brian Ray came up behind me to listen to us talk. I saw her looking up at something behind me. When I turned around Brian Ray took off. I didn’t know who the jerk was. He didn’t bother to introduce himself as you would expect from a mainstream person representing a mainstream legitimate HS method. I’ve been a professional sales rep for 27 years now and I don’t think much of Brian Ray.
Brian Ray says “the home-educated children in this sample are significantly better socialized and more mature than those in public schools,” p. 58. All I would need to do to prove this is incorrect, would be to find out if the children have any socializing time in their environment since the time they started HS. Ray doesn’t know what it means for a child to receive socializing and measuring the socializing of children as he says here is humanly impossible. He would have to crawl into the head of HS kids and classroom educated kids, to be able to do such a thing. His writing is deceptive in that he talks as if measuring a child’s social skills is a standard practice known to behavioral scientist.
These people are desperate to make a worthless incompetent HS method valid. I see so much in Ray’s book I’m tempted to write about but he isn’t worth it. What he knows of value about the HS method he could write on the back side of a small postage stamp and have room left for the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times newspaper. Ray has had it easy since the media love to promote HS. It’s a no brainer for Ray.
And Ray is just another idiot trying to unsuccessfully erase every negative thing about HS. You are making this irresponsible man, Ray, appear as a HS authority on your HS online presentation. There is not authority on HS that also promotes HS. How can anyone be an authority on HS and be oblivious to the severe and extreme harm it does children and carries throughout their lives. HS isn’t an alternative form of education and will die out in time.
I saw kids at church once a week. At first I tried to meet them and they wanted to know me. But there was no time for socializing. HS parents have never read up on what socializing is and don’t know what it is. I was just reading how the uninformed Dr. Brian Ray thinks going to church offers socializing but he doesn’t seem to know when.
An event has no guarantee of providing any socializing with what I see as stranger peers that you never feel like you know and feel comfortable with. As time went on my church peers became more and more distant since they saw that they were never going to get to know me and didn’t want to try any more.
Do you think as a child I understood why they did as they did? No, of course not. I experienced a great deal of rejection that wasn’t my fault and didn’t know what was wrong with me. It is only because I have studied behavioral science as an adult that I understand what happened way back 46 years ago.
Brian Ray would object that the passages I found in text books that describe the harm in HS don’t apply to HS. He doesn’t think HS should be what it is. This makes it real hard for him to consult behavioral science books and learn why HS is a rotten thing to do to a child.
Conservatives find HS ever so appealing. They see great opportunity to control the learning material, control what kind of kids mingle with their angles and so on. But believe me this isn’t a liberal vs. conservative problem in knowing the harm and shortchanging for being too isolated from peers.
HS shortchanges and harms children regardless of whether the parents lean toward fanaticism or mainstream all American wonderful people. What I’m telling you about HS is the incompetence, ineffectiveness, stupidity, twisted thinking that says the harm doesn’t exist because they can’t see that it does. They aren’t supposed to see it from a highly social childhood.
My parents were totally oblivious to the mistakes isolating children causes. It never occurred to them that growing up by yourself and studying alone were two of the most shitty things you can force down the throats of innocent children. Most all children want to be like the Jones. They don't want to have an abnormal life. But HS parents never think about this. If it isn’t important to them they don’t care what their kids think.
Now I could tell you individual problems the HS movement say only I experienced and HS kids today don’t have these problems, but when you look at them you forget you are looking at an experience you never had so you judge it by another experience--from a classroom experience in your world that has nothing to do with facing the lonely horrible terrible HS life experience. The explains why the harm in HS is invisible to you.
You destroy my effort to make you see how horrible life is for a HS kid, by thinking the wrong way about how you read. I never figured out a way to force my reader to read with intelligence. So I just don’t talk about these HS critically negative areas people like you think are nothing. Now I may get all excited thinking as I did for years that this is an experience that really shows how terrible HS is, and then I realize that when you read it with your interests to not believe what I’m saying to start with and relating it to your classroom experiences, it looks like nothing to you and you wonder what I’m all excited about.
This crazy situation is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. But there is no point in divulging information that means nothing to you. But if you were a kid still facing a typical HS life, it would mean all the world to you now if you could climb into a HS world now. I hope you see this grasp of what HS is in your mind is that it is a complex study that requires work, research, and mental discipline. Everyone for HS thinks it requires nothing to know it is a good idea—moron thinking.
There is no difference between my HS and those HSs today except my HS was a lot better than many I have read about or seen in person in my work selling Health Insurance. Normal children respond to the negative impact of growing up isolated from peers (that actually produce meaningful social interaction).
My reason for closing every home school in the world is because I know a dominant feature that makes HS the worst idea for children today. Brian Ray has absolutely no clue as to why I say HS shortchanges and hurts children. He lives in a social life with people who are accepting of eccentric, off-the-wall, abnormal HS ideas. I’m not fighting HS because I have a malicious unfounded dislike for it.
The only reason HS exists is because some humans or HS parents incorrectly think the harm doesn’t exist. I wish the harm didn’t exist so that I wouldn’t have had to experience the harm and shortchanging. I couldn’t care less that classroom educated or six kids classroom HSs, can’t relate to the harm. This isn’t my problem.
HS parents love their advantages even though there are none. They are focused on what is important and interesting to them and something they naturally relate to. They have no reason to fear the harm they don’t think exists could exist even when the HS leaders have assured them HS is harmless. Two million children today are in jeopardy because of the faulty thinking in error in some human brains.
So why should pro-HS people occupy their mind thinking about harm to their kids when they don’t believe in any harm existing. People who think it is exists don’t matter to these selfish HS parent pricks. Critics are just malicious people to the HS movement and their job is to get them to shut up.
I know the harm exists. It took me years to realize classroom educated people drew a complete blank about a HS feature that they could never see and can’t imagine. I have donated hundreds of thousands of hours the last 17 years to make sure the right people know the truth.
Bertrand Russell had an isolated childhood and he refused to Home School his kids even though he had the nut-brain eccentric mentality that the public schools weren’t good enough for his kids. So he formed a classroom school and taught a bunch of kids. Don’t think I’m the only one who has my vision HS is the most rotten, shitty, God awful horrible thing a parent can do to a kid. I would give anything if I could erase HS form my childhood, not because it was worse than HS today but because it is the same.
HS parents and leaders are not scholarly, trustworthy, honest, mainstream people. They have an illegitimate partial or half of an education in HS and they fight like vicious children to defend what most people see as an inadequate, incompetent, laughable so called educating method. Children need to be in legitimate, valid, competent classroom schools regardless of how much book-learning is learned.
Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or star. -- Confucius
Yours Truly,
Michael R. Shearer
Home Schooler, 7th year,
9th grade, Michael Shearer
in 1966 at 15
Home schooling should be illegal because government has a right to protect children from parents who abuse their children by isolating them at home. The perception of home school being a good idea comes from the ignorance of an experience these people never had.
The things they see as advantages I see as a mirage. Just because they are convinced these things are advantages, is no guarantee they are or that it is possible to obtain the benefit the advantages promise.
By the way many of our public schools all across America are wonderful places to get a good education in K -- 12 grades even today, and perhaps especially today.
Thank you for your careful consideration of a situation I suspect you are oblivious to, and have no capacity to see as a serious threat to the development of children.
Please review important enclosures.
Truly Yours,
Michael Shearer
Foremost Home Schooling Authority in the World Today
PS I've read 23 pro-home school books. And never found a supposed advantage to the method I agreed was an advantage. I honestly believe the so called advantages came from answers refuting arguments against home schooling. Home school parents liked their answers so well, they became the reasons for home schooling rather than drawbacks. This explains why I still see their perceived advantages as drawbacks. If home school parents could relate to the isolating in home schooling, they wouldn't have denied the drawbacks were real and harmful to their innocent children. They would have no motivation to justify the out-of-date home school method.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON WHY HOME
SCHOOLING IS BADPrepared by Michael Shearer
People who see home schooling as perfectly harmless, will not benefit from reading the following books. They see no connection between the adverse affects from isolating children this way described in the book, and what is happening to their children.
I recognize when they are talking about the bad effects of my home schooling because I know from experience this is what happened to me. Home school parents don't know when the bad affects described are talking about what happens to their children. They can read these books until they are blue in the face, and it never occurs to them the book is describing their child's harmful isolating home school life.
When my writings speak of peer social networks or relationships, I recalling from the behavioral material I studied. But home school parents think I giving my opinions based purely on my experience. Communicating in this issue has been the most frustrating experience I've ever had. People who don't want to know home schooling is bad for children come up with every excuse under the sun to not believe what I say.
If home school parents could relate to the experience, they could easily see how the isolating home school experience has an intolerable negative impact on development of peer social skills. If home school parents could relate to the isolating home schoolers experience, they would know why it is wrong for children without having to study the following information.
1. PEER RELATIONSHIPS IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT Edited by Thomas J. Berndt & Gary W. Ladd, John Wiley & Sons, 1989.
Home schoolers generally aren't around peers on a daily basis with quality time to develop vitally important peer relationships. Instead they have regular contact every few days with peer strangers who never treat each other as they would when they have peer relationships.
2. CHILDREN'S SOCIAL NETWORKS & SOCIAL SUPPORTS, Edited by Deborah Belle, John Wiley & Sons, 1989.
Children's social networks with peers is vitally important social skills development home schoolers rarely have opportunity to experience the same as they would if they attended classroom schools. Social networks are what give children confidence to develop more advanced skills in their social circles. Without this ingredient in their life, they can't grow and advance in their peer social skills.
3. EMOTIONAL CHILD ABUSE, by Joal Covitz, Sigo Press in Boston, Massachusetts, 1986.
This book makes it clear children considered property of parents experience severe psychological child abuse from parents who deprive them of normal peer social access and daily time to have quality social interaction with peers.
4. THE PSYCHOLOGICALLY BATTERED CHILD, by James Garbarino, Edna Guttmann, Janis Wilson Seeley, Jossely-Brass Publishers, 1986. See p. 27.
Discusses how isolating children is considered psychological maltreatment. The isolating factor in home schools is clearly child abuse.
5. THREATENED CHILDREN, by Joel Best, The University of Chicago Press, 1990. See p. 68.
Note how his definitions of child abuse fit the home schooler. Abuse happens when parents withdraw normal daily peer social interaction.
6. CONCISE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PSYCHOLOGY Edited by Raymond J. Corsini. See p. 811 for PEER INFLUENCES, and p. 1058 for SOCIAL ISOLATION.
Any recent encyclopedia of psychology will offer a great deal of information that points out why home schooling is bad for children.
6. THE PRODIGY by Amy Wallace, EP Dutton, 1986
Home Schooler William James Sidis born in 1898 was a child prodigy. At four he was typing proficiently. Between ages six and eight, he wrote four books. He learned over a few years Russian, French, German, Hebrew, Turkish and Armenian with help from his father.
There is no evidence he played with other children, and it is hard to imagine with whom he could have played. A Harvard mathematics professor let Billy read galleys of his latest book. Billy found several errors in the text which the professor duly revised.
In his 7th and 8th years Billy passed the Harvard Medical School anatomy exam and entrance examination for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before going to high school. He completed the four years of high school in six weeks. Billy's father, Dr. Boris Sidis, enrolled his son at Harvard at age eleven.
At Harvard a family friend had to write a letter for publication in Harvard Graduate Magazine encouraging students not to relate to Billy as a freak but welcome him into their fold. A college classmate noted Billy was considerably behind the majority of children of his age in social development and social adaptability. He also described Billy as "an infant with a full share of the infractuosities of a grown up".
Dr. Jessie Bogle, who was studying the ailments of children, predicted at best a nervous breakdown for little Billy. Billy had a nervous breakdown as a student at Harvard. He missed out on too much of the social side of learning growing up to handle so many peers who didn't relate to him as a friend but rather as a freak.
Billy never graduated from Harvard or any college. As an adult he refused to do any work that paid well or took advantage of his skills. A newspaper reporter discovered him years later, and reported how Billy lived in a boarding house with a low paying job using an adding machine. This came as an enormous embarrassment to Billy. He was a failure as an adult. He died at the young age of 46 with a cerebral hemorrhage.
Altogether Billy looked like the ordinary boy in normal health. The newspapers said "Billy was the most wonderful boy in the world".
Contact Michael:mrs7@ipa.net
Michael Shearer
Tualatin, OR
