Socialization Means Socialism?

The education establishment's favorite criticism of homeschooling seems to be that it fails to socialize young people. More often than not, the defenders of homeschooling respond that homeschooled students are socialized just fine: They are members of various youth organizations and church groups, they volunteer regularly, and they are otherwise active in their communities.

The truth is that defenders of homeschooling may not fully grasp the definition of socialization that the educational elite are using.

When the education establishment talks of socialization, they're not talking about trying to help the "fringe" kids get along with everyone else. Really, we've all been there. How often did your school officials (teachers included) help the social misfits and rejects fit in? Did your teachers pull the misfits aside during lunch and coach them to ditch the head-to-toe-black-goth-look for Levis and a Hollister shirt? Did they teach them how to interact with everybody else? Unlikely.

It turns out that if you dig into the writings of John Dewey, arguably the father of our current public school system, the definition of socialization differs greatly from what everyday Americans think. Take a read:

"I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move."

John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, January 1897

Any friend of individual freedom should be wary of philosophers and educators who propose that society shapes itself, as if society could move forward as one unit without the individual. More often than not, such thinking is the mark of one who elevates the collective over the individual.

In the late twenties, and after the communist takeover, John Dewey took a tour of Russia. He wrote about his experiences in Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World. In that document he reveals more precisely what he thinks about socialization:

"I do not see how any honest educational reformer in western countries can deny that the greatest practical obstacle in the way of introducing into schools that connection with social life which he regards as desirable is the great part played by personal competition and desire for private profit in our economic life. This fact almost makes it necessary that in important respects school activities should be protected from social contacts and connections, instead of being organized to create them. The Russian educational situation is enough to convert one to the idea that only in a society based upon the cooperative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation."

John Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World, Published in: The New Republic
 1929

Ah, yes, that cooperative principle. Or, in a word: socialism.

Is it possible that, when the education establishment critiques homeschoolers for a lack of socialization, they do not mean that homeschooled kids could be social misfits like the goths? Instead, is the education establishment implying that homeschoolers are educated as individuals apart from the collective and taught to think as such, and therefore are not being properly molded by the "cooperative principle" to be subservient to the collective? The writings of John Dewey would certainly support such a conclusion.