Diversity

The main concern I've heard from friends and relatives since we decided to homeschool has been that our kids won't be exposed to a diverse group of people. 'Diverse' seems to mean people from different ethnic groups and economic levels, and with other beliefs and other ways of thinking. The implication is always that public school guarantees this, whereas my children will be locked inside our hermetically sealed home for the duration of their childhood.

First of all, I don't think most public schools do much to expose kids to other ethnicities and income levels. The district where we live now is homogenous: I'd guesstimate that it's 90 to 95% white and upper-middle class. Because housing prices depend in part on school districts, and because schools are funded by local property taxes, we have strong economic segregation in our schools. Because we still have de facto racial segregation in many towns, and students usually attend the nearest school, we still have a large degree of racial segregation between schools.

Perhaps more importantly, students are segregated by race and economic level even within school districts that are fairly diverse. I went to a high school that was at least one third African American, and I had only one black friend (though I never saw her outside school), because there were so few blacks in the college prep path. Regular English class was half black, half white; AP English was white with one or two black kids. Our classes were divided the same way our neighborhoods were divided outside of school, even if the ostensible basis of the segregation was test scores. My preppie classmates were middle class just like I was, though there was real poverty within our school district. There is a tracking system in our schools, though it may not be formalized, and it discriminates against those who are not white or affluent. I pointed to some evidence of this in an earlier post on racial and socioeconomic inequalities in student achievement. It's not easy to pinpoint the subtle mechanisms that are at fault, but since homeschooling doesn't produce differences in achievement by race or socioeconomic status, some sort of discrimination takes place in school. Unfortunately, some students might come to the wrong conclusions when noting that all the kids in their advanced math class are white. I think it's just as likely that damaging stereotypes are reinforced in school, as that personal relationships occur to disprove those stereotypes. If you're sending your kid to public school to meet kids other than those in your neighborhood, you're going to be disappointed.

Secondly, as far as differing beliefs and other ways of thinking... well, I certainly learned about other points of view. My family was progressive, and the kids at school were not. In my family using a racial slur would have been absolutely unthinkable. In school, my best friend got called a "chink" several times a week on the playground. At home, the word "fag" was never heard, and my mom had several homosexual friends. At school, 'fag' was used incessantly to bully boys into a rigid, hostile version of masculinity; actual homosexuality did not, apparently, exist. At home, girls received as much respect as boys, and had just as many options in life. At school, girls were divided into goody-two-shoes vs. bitches, ditzes vs. nerds, prudes vs. sluts, and it was impossible to walk any imaginary fine line between them.

I am not sure how I could be said to have benefitted from being exposed to so much hatred. Am I a more well-rounded person for having attended school with a small group of neo-nazis, who once came to school wearing trenchcoats with swastika armbands? Am I a more well-rounded person because I learned that a 'bear trap' is a woman so ugly that after you sleep with her, you'd rather chew off your own arm than wake her? Am I more well-rounded because when I yelled "You're being racist!" at a boy calling my best friend a gook, he just grinned at me and said "So?" These were things I eventually learned to ignore, because to protest meant swimming against a strong tide and getting nowhere. But there is nothing good in becoming desensitized to slurs like this. Outrage is the right response, but in high school you can't afford to be outraged every moment of the day. You get used to hateful labels and ugly prejudices.

Even the argument that one must face facts about the cultural composition of our nation, that one must be realistic about the presence of racism and sexism if one is to be politically educated, does not hold water. There is far more hate in high school than in real life. It is an environment of competition, cliques, and hostility, in which kids busily classify and label themselves and others, and it is not representative of the adult population.

When people say they benefitted from going to school with kids from different backgrounds, I have to admit, it sometimes sounds a bit sanctimonious to me. Just going to school with kids of other ethnicities doesn't mean you learn about, say, the causes of racism and why it is immoral and unfair, or about immigration and xenophobia, or about other cultures. Just going to school with poor kids doesn't teach you about poverty in America. You certainly aren't going to get the full story in social studies class, because history and social studies have been patriotically whitewashed. I feel as if people are saying "Look how tolerant and liberal I am," and then attributing that to the public schools because they've bought into a myth.

I trust that my kids will learn more from reading books set in foreign cultures than from merely sitting beside a child with a different skin color. And that being aware of poverty in the United States, trying to understand its causes, and volunteering in some charitable capacity will teach them more about class structure and social responsibility than they would learn by watching the kids with hand-me-down clothes get treated with taunts and derision.

I want my kids to meet people from plenty of different backgrounds, but in an environment where diversity can actually be appreciated, not in one where everyone is merely trying to keep their head down and attract as little attention as possible. We are lucky enough to live near a college town where you can walk through campus and hear six languages, where you can get sushi, Indian, and gourmet French practically on the same block, where we get visitors such as Ugandan basket weavers and South American steel drum bands. Thankfully, I'll be able to take my kids to experience these things, since they won't be closed up all week with the same 30 or 40 white kids dressed in Abercrombie and Fitch.