The most convicing proof that home-educated children develop normally is a conversation with a home-educated child who's bright, engaged, polite, interesting, and outgoing. Home-school graduates get into college and do fine; they get jobs and excel.

But it's important to understand what socialization means. According to the dictionary, socialization is "the process by which a human being, beginning in infancy, acquires the habits, beliefs, and accumulated knowledge of his society." In other words, you're being socialized when you learn habits, acquire beliefs, learn about the society around you, develop character traits, and become competent in ths skills you need to function properly in society.

Who teaches all of this? Agents of socialization include the family (both immediate and extended), the religious community, neighborhoods, tutors and mentors, the media (TV, radio, films, books, magazines all tell the child what's expected of him, for better or worse), clubs (social or academic), the arts (both in observation and participation), travel, jobs, civic participation. And formal schooling is an institution.

Taking the child out of school doesn't mean theat you're going to remove him from the other "agents of socialization" that surround him. Furthermore, think about the type of socialization that takes place in school. The child learns how to function in a specific environment, one where he's surrounded by thirty children his own age. This is a very specific type of socialization, one that may not prove particularly useful. When, during the course of his life, will he find himself in this kind of context? Not in work or in family life or in his hobbies. The classroom places the child in a peer-dominated situation that he'll probably not experience again.

And this type of socialization may be damaging. Thirty years ago, Cornell Professor of Child Development Urie Bronfenbrenner warned that the "socially-isolated, age-graded peer group" created a damaging dependency in which middle-school students relied on their classmates for approval, direction, and affection. He warned that if parents, other adults, and older children continued to be absent from the active daily life of younger children, we could expect "alienation, indifference, antogonism, and violence on the part of the younger generation."

Peer acceptance is dangerous. When a child is desperate to fit in — to receive acceptance from those who surround him all day, every day — he may defy your rules, go against his own conscience, or even break the law.

We live in an age in which people think a great deal about their peers, talk about them constantly, and act as if a child's existence will be meaningless if he isn't accepted by his peer group. But the socialization that best prepares a child for the real world can't take place when a child is closed up in a classroom or always with his peer group. It happens when the child is living with people who vary widely in age, personality, background, and circumstance.

The antidote for peer-centered socialization is to make the family the basic unit for socialiation — the center of the child's experience. The family should be the place where real things happen, where there is a true interest in each other, acceptance, patience, and peace, as far as it possible.

Socialization in the family starts when very young children learn that they can trust adults to give them answers, to read books to them, to talk to them, to listen to music with them....

Socialization continues as the child learns to fit into the lives of his parents and siblings, to be considerate and thoughtful of other people, to be unselfish instead of self-centered. A two year old can learn to play along for a few minutes while the parent teachers a ten year old; an eight year old can learn not to practice the piano during the baby's nap time. It's the real world when a child learns to play quietly because Daddy is working on his income taxes....

In our society, children, taught by their peer gropus, learn to survive, not to live with kindness and grace. Exclusive peer groups — cliques — start forming around age five. Even in kindergarten, children are accepted or rejected on the basis of what they wear, what toys they own, what TV programs they watch. Even when adults are supervising, these cliques survive — and strengthen — as children grow. And only the strongest flourish.

The trend in our culture is to devalue — even bypass — the family as a basic unit of socialization. But it's within the family that children learn to love by seeing love demonstrated; learn unselfishness both through teaching and through example (choosing to teach a child at home is unselfishness at work); learn conflict resolution by figuring out how to get along with parents and with each other.

The family unit — the basic agent of socialization — is itself a place to communicate with people of different ages. But socialization doesn't stop there. As a family, you should make a wide range of friends of various ages. Home-school parent and lawyer Christopher Klicka points out that home-educated children are continually socialized through community activities, Little League, Scouts, band, music lessons, art classes, field trips, and the numerous events sponsored by local home-school support groups.