Do Kids Really Need to Be ‘Socialized’?

Jeremy Shuler is 12 years old and attending Cornell University this fall. Not everyone thinks this is a great idea.

Shuler is no average kid. He knew the alphabet at 15 months old, read in both Korean and English by age two and did pre-calculus by the tender age of 5. At age 12, he scored better on the SAT than 99.6 percent of all those who took it last year.

Few of us can say we were that far along at age 12. But most of us remember the silly things we did at that age and realize we probably would not have been ready for college then.

Besides, some say, we would have missed out on important socialization experiences by not going through school with kids our own age.

“This is actually really horrible. At 12 years old, you’re nowhere near emotionally ready to go to college,” one tweeter wrote.

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“A 12-year-old is enrolling in Cornell’s engineering program this fall,” snarked New York Times contributor Alizon Zeidman. “The one thing he won’t learn how to build: social skills.”

“Social skills” is a common argument against having children who are advanced academically through skipping grades, homeschooling or other measures to get their education faster than their age group peers. But not only did Shuler not go through school with people his age — he was homeschooled.

That meant no sustained opportunity to interact with others and build his social skills. Right?

“He loves people,” his father Andy Shuler told The Washington Post. “He will go up and talk to anyone.”

Kids learn to have more confidence in their decisions and avoid the drug and alcohol issues found in public schools.

Not only will he talk to anyone, he seems drawn to older fellow students. When his parents put him in math groups, he gravitated toward the older kids.

This is not uncommon, according to the National Association for Gifted Children.

“Gifted children are often happier with older children who share interests and abilities,” the organization wrote on its website. “Accelerated students go on to succeed professionally at higher levels than those in the general student population and report they wish they had even more opportunities for acceleration while in school.”

Parents whose kids don’t qualify as run-of-the-mill for any number of reasons have begun to question the socialization argument as well.

The mommy blogger behind Emily’s Puzzle wrote about this with regard to her own kids.

“I decided to homeschool my children,” she said on her blog. “Needless to say, I fell for all the rhetoric [people tossed her way about it] and got to work setting up as many playdates as I could. I was determined to prove that my autistic, homeschooled boys were not going to be socially awkward — well, anymore than they normally would have been.”

Related: The Real Benefits of Homeschooling

She discovered an important truth about all kids, not just homeschooled kids.

“Playdates with typical children help me to see that ‘normal’ is a broad term and that typical children can be socially awkward too,” she wrote. “It’s good for me to see that some of my sons’ quirky traits are not solely due to their having autism. All kids are weird. Period.”

Another homeschooling mom cringes when people assert her kids are not socialized.

“Yes, homeschool families are socialized,” wrote Michelle Cannon on her mommy blog “The Heart of Michelle.” “They are socialized to their family, friends, homeschool groups and community … They’re learning to socialize with people of varying ages and backgrounds within the ‘real world.’”

As for the claims of The New York Times contributor — it’s likely Shuler’s “social skills” will be better for his associations with adults so early in life. After all, it’s adults, not other kids, we have to learn to get along with out there in the world.

“Outside of the public school system, it’s not ‘normal’ to be secluded with 20 to 30 same-age peers … In the work force, they’ll be working and interacting with kids fresh out of college and those on the cusp of retirement,” wrote a mommy blogger on the site “Embark on the Journey.” “In the natural environment of a sports team, dance class, or out and about in town, kids learn to share, take turns, stand in line, problem solve and keep their hands to themselves. All of this should be learned outside a classroom setting. It’s real life.”

Mixed-age education and individual tutoring were the norm for much of rural American history.

Kids also learn to have more confidence in their decisions and avoid the drug and alcohol issues found in many public schools.

Darryl James, a 5th Degree Black Belt and owner of the James Martial Arts Academy in California, wrote on his blog, “Homeschooled children are often more confident in their abilities and they have no problems fitting in with other children their age. There are enrichment classes available to children of all ages in San Diego, such as gymnastics, karate, art and even guitar lessons.”

Actress Sam Sorbo questions whether Shuler may be too young to go to college — but she said she does find homeschooled children to have more maturity than average children.

“I am often commended on the maturity of my own children, who are homeschooled, but they are only 14, 12 and 10,” Sorbo, author of “They’re Your Kids,” told LifeZette. “I think it comes down to the children who are homeschooled having the opportunity to spend the day with their parents and other adults, instead of spending their entire day in an institution with one group of people, mainly their same age.”

A Homeschool Legal Defense Association study found that grown-up home-schooled adults have greater job satisfaction and are more involved in their community — coaching sports teams, volunteering at schools, church or neighborhood associations — than the general U.S. population.

Plus, there’s no proof public schools with same-age classrooms help with socialization. They may actually be hurting it.

Related: For Dads, It’s Nature AND Nurture

Schools have been lessening recess time due to the demands of Common Core; they’ve been burying kids in cyberspace and technology.

Phoneticians and linguists point to the dramatic increase in “up talkers” — people who end declarative sentences with question marks — as evidence students are not as confident in their work as they were in years past.

“I teach a 4th-year university course in which part of the requirement is a seminar presentation,” Hank Davis wrote in his column ‘The Uptalk Epidemic.’ “Students used to stand up and share the results of their research in a way that conveyed their confidence and knowledge. They no longer do. Even if they do feel confident, their culture now mandates that they dial it back and sound like this: ‘My name is Jennifer? My seminar today is on bystander apathy? There is quite a bit of research on this topic?'”

Mixed-age education and individual tutoring were actually the norm for much of rural American history. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, most American students attended mixed-age one-room schoolhouses. Not until the invention of motorized school buses — which enabled students to be brought from farther away and schools thus to become bigger — did students begin to learn in same-grade classrooms.

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In rural Grand Ledge, Michigan, children still learn in a one-room schoolhouse with children of other ages. In a recent report about the school on CBS News, first-grader Thomas Trygier told the network he learned a lot in kindergarten by overhearing and working with the third graders.

“In this school, he is still a first grader, but he’s doing second and third grade work in reading and math,” the boy’s mother said.

“The final step or phase of education is for the student to be able to reiterate or teach the material to someone else,” Sorbo told LifeZette. “That’s why the one-room classroom and other educational methods have been so successful, because they afford older students the opportunity to teach the younger pupils.”

Many athletes have advanced their goals by turning to homeschooling, including football player Tim Tebow and Olympic figure skater Michelle Kwan, snowboarders Jamie Anderson and Shaun White and gymnast Simone Biles.

Homeschooling is not a panacea to American education’s problems; neither is sending a 12-year-old to Cornell. But these decisions are right for some people, and for others, it’s time to rethink blind allegiance to the group-think principles of same-grade education.