I've seen children that were previously home-schooled introduced to public high school settings, and there is only one word that describes their integration: Inept.Grades were overall poorer than they received at home. They lacked social skills, because they had never been around peers continuously, and had difficulty making friends.
It was said that school doesn't teach one the three R's anymore. Well, it did in my case. I can do math, I can read damn well and I plan to make writing into a career. I don't think I'd even be interested in any of that if I hadn't been forced to learn it in school, but in retrospect I'm thankful I was.
And as for unquestioning obediance to authority being taught there as well, that reeks to me of adolescent angst and the tendency to rebel. I know in highschool I demonized parents and teachers and peers, everything was "stupid", or "pointless", and there were more important things I could be doing. I blamed my troubles on "society", and "the system"; I fought against "conformity".
Guess what? So does everybody else. I relinquished those statements the minute I realized that those sentences betrayed a very immature, undisciplined mind. They were the source of all my suffering, as well as notebooks full of bad teenage poetry.
The world doesn't conspire against us, school teachers and administration don't have secret meetings where they discuss how to make us all the same, and high school is eons easier than the pressures and the stress of "the real world".
I thought people were supposed to grow out of those kinds of thoughts the older they became. I guess maybe if you stayed in school those would be lessons you'd have learned.
