Ireland's big school secret: how a year off-curriculum changes teenage lives

My child is too young for school but my partner and I expect to homeschool. We've talked about gap years in the childs early/mid teens for travel/backpacking/nature excursions. I wish fellowship and apprentice work was more commonplace in the younger years too. Get out of the classroom and experience the real world.

How do you plan on your child building out their social skills? Surely a couple of playdates a week with a few other kids isn’t going to cut it.

We homeschooled. When we worried about our kids' socialization, we yanked them into the bathroom and beat them up for their lunch money.

I'm kidding, but... you want school to build your kids' social skills? Apart from all the pathologies common in schools, you want your kids to grow up to live in an adult world, which is almost completely unlike school.

Yeah, homeschooling can be done where the kids are isolated and never interact with anyone outside the family. It doesn't have to be, though.

> I'm kidding, but... you want school to build your kids' social skills? Apart from all the pathologies common in schools, you want your kids to grow up to live in an adult world, which is almost completely unlike school.

I mean... yes, it seems reasonable to learn social skills from a school setting? Interacting with other people, some of whom dislike/disagree with each other, interacting with other adults, etc. This seems like a reasonable step toward what you describe as 'the adult world' - which, yes, is rather different from school, but that seems a good thing; throwing a child into 'the adult world' without preparation would be crazy, right?

(I'm not trying to deny that one can learn the necessary social skills while being homeschooled, just disagree with the implication that school is not also a good place to develop them)

“Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.” ― John Taylor Gatto

> cage > isolation > interruptions > ridicule > shame

I wonder if this person's view on schools is at all biased.

I'd say someone who taught in NYC public schools for 30 years and won teacher of the year award is a good resource to learn from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto