The "Real" World

I was discussing homeschoooling with a member of my barbershop chorus, and he said something about the real world. His daughter was homeschooled for a while, incidentally. He agreed with me that real learning that takes place in the real world is the most valuable. I said (& now I am expanding), "I do not want to take my kids out of the real world in the first place. That's what schools do. Nowhere else in the real world will you ever see a bunch of humans of the same age in one place - not to mention against their will. Schools are just not real. They are a relic of the early industrial age pre-occupied with mass-production. You could get any color car as long as it was black, and everybody went through the same "bottling process" called education - 2 parts science, 3 parts math, 5 parts of history and so on. My kids are in the real world, where geography and geometry and history and music and philosophy are all interconnected. It is ironic when people in the school system worry about how homeschoolers will fare in the real world!"

Billy Joel's Greatest Hits has been on a continuous loop in the minivan for a couple of weeks now. Here's a gem from "You're Only Human (Second Wind)":

"So take it from me, you'll learn more from your accidents than anything you could ever learn at school"!

That's the way the real world works.