Girl or Boy Scouts, sports teams, ballet lessons, music lessons, 4-H Club, church youth groups, summer camp, kids in the neighborhood, or one of the many homeschool groups. Plenty of places to meet new people.
Point taken. What are the 4-H Clubs? I've never heard of the homeschool groups as well.
4H Club might be just a US thing. It started out as kind of a farming club, but I think they do a lot more stuff now. The 4 H's stand for Head, Heart, Hands, and Health.
Guess it's not just US, here's their description:
4-H has grown into a community of 6 million young people across America learning leadership, citizenship and life skills. 4-H can be found in every county in every state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and over 80 countries around the world.
They focus on:
* Science, Engineering and Technology
* Healthy Living
* Citizenship
Well, I always thought that being home-schooled is not the best idea. I mean, you have to learn how to deal with mean or even cruel people in your life. They won't just disappear in your adult life. And how do you meet new people at this age if you don't attend any classes?
I had a really bad time in the middle school. I was bullied because I always got the best grades and was really rubbish at sports. It was tough but now I'm grateful for the experience because it certainly made me stronger.
Still, you can't be home-schooled in Poland so I'm not an expert.
I agree that you should learn to deal with people like that, but not when you're so young. The bullying at my school left me with a bit of a psychological scar- I don't really remember much about school, but what I do isn't good. I also have to really trust someone before I befriend them - girls especially so.
Home education was great for me. I still managed to socialise. As Kayte said, there are loads of youth clubs that you can go to to meet people. School is not the be all and end all of socialising.
The whole thing I have against registration is the fact that only home educators are targeted. Why not register every child in the UK regardless of their education? Why are home educators more likely to abuse their kids? There are loads of kids around my area who don't attend school but who are not home educated. These are the children who are more open to abuse, not kids who have been de-registered from the school system.
I got so annoyed with this topic today, I ended up writing an article. You can read it here. It should clear up some issues.
What's obvious is that you've had a very good experience of home education and, unsurprisingly given that I'm offering up a different viewpoint, I've had a generally good experience of state schools. That doesn't make either of us right, there are plenty of people who've had bad experiences of one or both. You are lucky to be a highly motivated person and have very supportive parents but there's a great number of people who don't have those things; look around a classroom and most of the students won't do work until they absolutely have to. I'm not saying I wasn't one of them. However, I think it's a good thing to keep an eye on home "education" - I know a boy who was taken out of school for a few months because he wasn't really enjoying it and his parents taught him nothing. The idea was that he would get bored and choose to go back to school in due course. Thankfully that happened, but I'm sure there are people for whom home education involves very little learning.
Socially I think school/college of some kind is important as there's really no substitute but I agree you can wait until you are a bit older to learn to counter bullying.
Oh, and the abuse point. I thin they mean abusing their education, as I said above, which is undoubtedly easier with home education than in a state school kinda environment. I agree with the idea of checking the children are being taught but not that the government should dictate what or how they are taught (precisely how that would work may involve slightly more specific ideas than that).
