77% of Youth Bullied at School

I read this at Contentment Acres

Somewhere on someone's blog someone said that children need to go to school so they can have the experience of being bullied, so they can learn to deal with it. I mentioned this to a homeschooling acquaintance and she said, smiling, "Siblings can handle that part of it!"

But really, she has a point, and we went on to talk a bit about how sibling hassles if they are managed decently really have a shot at teaching the kind of life lessons that the advocates of schoolyard bullying (yes, they do exist!) are advocating. At school, bullying is ratcheted up to the level of the bullier's environment, which might include playing Mortal Kombat, looking up torture methods on the internet, and/or gang membership and weaponry. Plus, the bullying is essentially decontextualized and often based on the very kind of thing that makes someone successful outside the school walls -- uniqueness, special gifts, even handicaps.

Sibling issues are usually based on the tensions that stem from intimacy. That makes them different. Not good, but I would say qualitatively different, and less random.

I don't know why homeschool critics imagine that homeschools live in a combination of a sheltered bubble and a repressive cage. A family environment is almost the opposite. According to the Church, it's a society in microcosm. That certainly echoes my own experience.