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Homeschooling Isn’t Anti-Social

THE ISSUE by Kevin Fahy, February/March 2006

I will admit to being something of a loner. That doesn’t mean I don’t love my friends and family, or enjoy spending time with them, it just means that I can also enjoy being alone. Sometimes I even prefer it.

When I was growing up, playing sports was always my first choice of things to do, and it remains the case to this day (I have all the torn cartilage to prove it). Then as now, however, I was always capable of enterta ining myself at home when there was no ballgame to be had.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, I’m not alone, so to speak. Over the past century, the clearest trend among Americans has been our steadily increasing demand for entertainment, more and more of which is pursued in private. During the period from 2000 to 2005 alone, the amount of time spent by adults on the various media increased by more than 6 percent.

Average Internet use rose by 75 percent to 183 hours per year, which is about the same amount of time spent reading newspapers. Watching television is still king, at 1,560 hours, followed by listening to the radio at around 980. I don’t know how many hours were spent reading books, but Americans purchased 3.17 billion of them, or more than a dozen for every citizen who can read. Presumably we also picked up some of the ones that were already lying around, and, thank God, we still consume a hefty stack of magazines.

Among those who study our culture, there is some concern about the implications of this trend line. In December, The New York Times asked Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor and author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, to comment on the census data.

“The distinctive effect of technology has been to enable us to get entertainment and information while remaining entirely alone. That is from many points of view very efficient. I also think it’s fundamentally bad because the lack of social contact, the social isolation means that we don’t share information and values and outlooks that we should.”

The title of his book refers to the fact that participation in bowling has actually increased in recent years, but leagues, tournaments, and other group activities have diminished, transforming a social sport into another solitary hobby. Putnam argues that such a change is simply emblematic of the broader change in our society. Over the past 25 years, family dinners together have decreased by 33 percent, while entertaining friends at home has declined by a startling 45 percent.

For most baby boomers, those numbers ring true. Family dinners weren’t an optional thing for us as kids, they were the immutable constant in our lives. We sat down together at the same time every evening in the same place, and observed a very clear set of rules. I’m sure that most of us had very little idea of what our parents had gone through to create that world, but we knew better than to question it.

The world they created also included a lot of partying. My parents, like most of their generation, maintained social relationships with a sizeable circle of friends, and it seemed as though somebody was entertaining on any given weekend. Overnight guests were commonplace at our house as well, typically my father’s old army buddies, or old college buddies, or guys from the old neighborhood.

I recently read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (which may seem like an unusual selection to you, but I often read the books my wife is teaching in school). It struck me throughout that the social life of early 19th-century English aristocrats was not very different from middle-class America 150 years later. People played a lot of card games, went to dinner parties or dances, and stayed over at each other’s homes. What alone time they had was largely devoted to writing letters to friends regarding those activities.

During our brief time on stage, all that has changed. Most of us go to just a handful of parties in an entire year, and it takes a special occasion to get the whole family together for dinner. In terms of houseguests, who would tend to be people from previous periods of our lives, we just aren’t very good at keeping in touch anymore. How often do you see anyone you knew in college?

Bowling isn’t the only thing we’re doing alone, and I am not referring to the late Madeline Kahn’s song about making love. More people now play “cards” with their computer than with other people, and video games provide simulations of every human activity, from basketball to car theft. At the rate we’re going, in another generation we won’t need to get up off the couch for anything, but like the Pinball Wizard, we’ll all have very supple wrists.

It doesn’t take a social scientist to know which way the wind blows, or to figure out that it’s not a good thing. We are a social species, programmed to learn from group interaction and thrive amid a population of our fellow creatures.

That’s the thing that troubles me about homeschooling. The homeschoolers I’ve known have done a great job, both as parents and educators, but I wonder what the kids might lose by avoiding the sort of immersion that most of us experienced. I disliked high school intensely but am still glad I went, if that makes any sense.

More to the point, I worry about the effect that our increasing isolation has on the way we do business. I don’t have any statistics to throw at you, but it sure seems as though business people rarely take the time to go see their customers or suppliers anymore. We retreated from travel to phone, from phone to fax, from fax to e-mail. What’s next, telepathy?

That is why the upcoming trade shows are so important. It’s not really about seeing the exhibits, it’s about seeing each other. Even old lone wolves need to join the pack now and then.