David
No one who has ever actually met my kids has ever asked me whether they have been properly socialized. Not one. Which isn’t to say they are perfect – or perhaps it is more accurate to say they are perfect in the way children are. They squabble, argue, and slam doors; they can be recalcitrant, whiny, overbearing, bossy, insensitive, selfish, rude, arrogant, and, though very rarely, cruel. They remind me, in their worst moments, of our nation’s political leaders. They can also be quite charming, and extraordinarily tenacious in carrying out their learning quests.

What they haven’t experienced is a room full of children confined together by compulsion, having nothing necessarily in common but their chronological age, sitting at little desks and chairs seen nowhere else in the civilized world, confronted by an adult who for the most part asks only questions for which she already knows the answers, and whose sole purpose is to transfer information from her own head to that of her charges. I shudder what it would be like to exist in a workplace like this, with only other 50-year-olds, and confronted day in and day out with a boss who asked only questions for which he already knew the answer.

It is through this "socialization" that children learn the lessons of unfreedom, for which there are only three possible responses: passivity, slavishness, or mindless rebellion. None of these three responses are good ways to go out and meet the world, and they are not, in my judgment, ultimately conducive to human happiness. They are foreign to the very being of the child, which is why so much energy must be expended in hammering them home. One can fill a child with facts, concepts, or "values", but these will never compensate for the emptiness which comes with having learned to be unfree.

The so-called "crisis in our schools" reflects their success in preventing children from learning to exercise freedom responsibly. Their purpose is to train a docile, malleable workforce prepared "to meet the challenges of the 21^st century", who will not try to challenge the status quo too much, and who will find or define their self-image through the consumption of material goods and services. The schools are not failing; they are spectacularly successful in carrying out this mission. The only problem is that this "socialization" flies in the face of what it means to be truly human, which has a wondrous way of making itself known through the chinks in our educational institutions, and elsewhere as well.

Joe:
How are your children Meera & Aliyah doing these days, and what are they up to?

David
Meera and Aliyah are doing wondrously well these days. Meera, now 9, is an extremely gifted pianist (currently slowly working her way through Mozart’s 23^rd Piano Concerto and heaps of Bach), has taught herself to play the flute spectacularly well, and spends 20 hours a week or more in gymnastics. She teaches herself math, mostly on the computer, reads an occasional book or two (mostly for "facts", she’s not particularly fond of fiction), and is extremely sociable and people-oriented.