Homelifing
Jun. 25th, 2011 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupThis is inspired pretty much by Sharon Astyk's blog as a whole, there's no one entry I can point to. To summarize the overall sense I get from it: Community is important to Astyk. She wants to build strong, interconnected communities. The economist in me says "but I am tied to the people who grow my food, even if it's mediated through a supermarket", but I also know that getting my eggs from an urban chicken farming friend from martial arts feels different than buying them. I just can't explain why.
I'm not going to do justice to her position, but in a nutshell: Astyk wants us to move to much more of the eggs-from-friends model, she wants communities that are heavily linked together and mutually supportive, and she wants these communities to be accepting of everyone. I think she's missing some of the costs of this, but that's a topic for another post. I have nothing but admiration for Astryk's attempts to form the world she wants by altering her own life and teaching others how to do the same* even if I don't want to participate in them**.
I was homeschooled for a year, my brother for three, to get us the hell out of middle school. The number one question my parents got about this was "what about socialization?", which is weird, because no one asked about socialization when I was being ostracized and assaulted at my traditional school, or when my friend (at a different school, who I met as an adult) was facing daily rape threats and her teachers were laughing about it. So really, fuck you concern trolls.
But homeschooling socialization is different than going to traditional school, and that should be acknowledged. By and large, you get to choose who you see. There may be some organized activities, and even some long running ones, but it's not the same as school. This changes the dynamics of friendship: you have to learn to take far more initiative than you do at a school. That goes double for if you have a fight: there's no continual proximity to wear away the hurt (or motivate you to forget the hurt). It also gives the kids fewer chances to learn to tolerate people they dislike, or once liked and now don't. On the other hand, that probably makes kids better at deliberately reaching out, and it means they don't spend 13 years being told that they have to put up with bigger kids hitting them (or don't face a rude awakening at age 18 that people only tolerated them out of fear, and now they have no social skills). Overall, homeschoolers are going to learn more about deliberate action and less about putting up with shit.
I think the modern world has brought to adults what homeschooling brings to children. When 95% of the people born in a small town died in the same small town, it was a lot like school: you had no choice about who was there, you saw them constantly, even if you ignored them they still had a huge impact on your life. That produced some valuable friendships that wouldn't otherwise exist, and made people better at tolerating the obnoxious (from their in group). But it also meant that you couldn't get away from assholes the way you can now, and you were sort of screwed if you didn't fit in with your community of birth. I know that the free contact model for adults works vastly better for me, but that doesn't mean it's morally superior.
*I suspect I'd be less thrilled about her political actions, but she doesn't write about them often.
**I do want a milking goat, or at least a friend with a milking goat.
I'm not going to do justice to her position, but in a nutshell: Astyk wants us to move to much more of the eggs-from-friends model, she wants communities that are heavily linked together and mutually supportive, and she wants these communities to be accepting of everyone. I think she's missing some of the costs of this, but that's a topic for another post. I have nothing but admiration for Astryk's attempts to form the world she wants by altering her own life and teaching others how to do the same* even if I don't want to participate in them**.
I was homeschooled for a year, my brother for three, to get us the hell out of middle school. The number one question my parents got about this was "what about socialization?", which is weird, because no one asked about socialization when I was being ostracized and assaulted at my traditional school, or when my friend (at a different school, who I met as an adult) was facing daily rape threats and her teachers were laughing about it. So really, fuck you concern trolls.
But homeschooling socialization is different than going to traditional school, and that should be acknowledged. By and large, you get to choose who you see. There may be some organized activities, and even some long running ones, but it's not the same as school. This changes the dynamics of friendship: you have to learn to take far more initiative than you do at a school. That goes double for if you have a fight: there's no continual proximity to wear away the hurt (or motivate you to forget the hurt). It also gives the kids fewer chances to learn to tolerate people they dislike, or once liked and now don't. On the other hand, that probably makes kids better at deliberately reaching out, and it means they don't spend 13 years being told that they have to put up with bigger kids hitting them (or don't face a rude awakening at age 18 that people only tolerated them out of fear, and now they have no social skills). Overall, homeschoolers are going to learn more about deliberate action and less about putting up with shit.
I think the modern world has brought to adults what homeschooling brings to children. When 95% of the people born in a small town died in the same small town, it was a lot like school: you had no choice about who was there, you saw them constantly, even if you ignored them they still had a huge impact on your life. That produced some valuable friendships that wouldn't otherwise exist, and made people better at tolerating the obnoxious (from their in group). But it also meant that you couldn't get away from assholes the way you can now, and you were sort of screwed if you didn't fit in with your community of birth. I know that the free contact model for adults works vastly better for me, but that doesn't mean it's morally superior.
*I suspect I'd be less thrilled about her political actions, but she doesn't write about them often.
**I do want a milking goat, or at least a friend with a milking goat.
