Basic culture literacy? Or, by homeschooling I've screwed up my kid.

[Melissa Louise]

Ppl know that you can be literate in multiple modes, right?

Like, you can grow up to read Rilke, but also like your British police procedural TV?

I lived with an art snob for many years, and it was tiresome.

No, you're not a better, more literate person because you will only read Oulipo and Proust.

It's good to grow up to be culturally flexible, imo, if for no other reason than not many people want to talk about Rilke all day.

 

[LMD]

On 6/29/2023 at 8:59 AM, Heartstrings said:

A lot of formerly homeschooled adults do talk about not having shared cultural literacy as being something that they feel made them stick out uncomfortably with their peers and do feel like it interfered with social relationships in college and as a young adult.  I think those are voices we do well to listen to and at least consider if there is a way to mitigate those effects on our own children.  This is a path that others have gone down before and we can benefit from their perspective.  
 

Maybe seeing more kids movies in the theater, or a family movie night can be a compromise.  We also watch TV shows together as a family, like the Mandorian and all the Star Wars spin offs.    Most series are only 8 episodes now, so once a week commitments for a limited time frame.  

I get what you mean, I really do and we were always conscious of avoiding making our hs kids extra weird, but to play devil's advocate, if this is their childhood complaint then they are remarkably blessed. Perhaps what they're really missing isn't 'culture' but 'perspective/gratefulness' with maybe a dose of 'maturity.' 

Sometimes homeschooled kids tend to blame all their awkwardness on homeschool, when it's often just life. Lots of people don't fit in for lots of reasons. Reading literature instead of watching tv is a much better reason than violent stepdad for example, in my experience. 🤷‍♀️ 

[Heartstrings]

1 minute ago, LMD said:

I get what you mean, I really do and we were always conscious of avoiding making our hs kids extra weird, but to play devil's advocate, if this is their childhood complaint then they are remarkably blessed. Perhaps what they're really missing isn't 'culture' but 'perspective/gratefulness' with maybe a dose of 'maturity.' 

Sometimes homeschooled kids tend to blame all their awkwardness on homeschool, when it's often just life. Lots of people don't fit in for lots of reasons. Reading literature instead of watching tv is a much better reason than violent stepdad for example, in my experience. 🤷‍♀️ 

Yes, listening to them sometimes they seem to mistake homeschooling as the problem, not the strict fundy lifestyle their parents chose, they also seem to think public school is a wonderful happy place.   But this one part is something they all seem to talk about as a thing that really made life harder for them as young adults and that makes them feel isolated even years later.   It seems easy enough to mitigate for our kids now, seeing other adults reflect back and seeing how things affected them.
 

 Some of these are adults my own age, so dismissing them as just being immature doesn’t feel right.  Although still being naive and immature at 40 isn’t a huge selling point of their parents chosen lifestyle.  

[GailV]

2 hours ago, Melissa Louise said:

Ppl know that you can be literate in multiple modes, right?

Like, you can grow up to read Rilke, but also like your British police procedural TV?

I lived with an art snob for many years, and it was tiresome.

No, you're not a better, more literate person because you will only read Oulipo and Proust.

It's good to grow up to be culturally flexible, imo, if for no other reason than not many people want to talk about Rilke all day.

 

Dd got an interview at (famous independent bookstore) because her list of recent reading was so eclectic. Hundreds of people applied to the place, so getting called in was a fun little surprise. She and I figured homeschoolers were what they wanted for employees given how we read everything from classics to mind-candy. Cultural flexibility for the win!

(For the record, she didn't pursue that job.)