Here is an interesting article from “Foundation Of Economic Education” that explores “socialization”, and what is meant by that term:
We are all the product of “socialization” more than we, ourselves, can ever know. When I was 15 years old I thought bell-bottomed pants were the coolest thing ever, and so did everyone else. But now I look at those old grainy pictures and wonder what I was thinking. And that’s just clothes. What new ideas, implanted by the institution, were I also “wearing” on my mind? I can think of a few, but they don’t bother me. It’s the evil and wrong ones I still carry, and don’t realize that I do, that bother me, for they’re being passed from the institution, through me, to my own children.
This really is a fascinating read, and I highly recommend it. Here’s just a bit from the article:
In the early 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments on the dangers of group influence. When presented with simple problems that 95 percent of individuals could answer correctly when free of group influence, 75 percent of Asch’s test subjects would get the answer wrong when it meant concurring with the group.
In 2005, neuroscientist Gregory Berns conducted an updated version of Asch’s experiments, complete with brain scans to determine if the wrong answers were a conscious acquiescence to social pressure or if, instead, test subjects believed that their group-influenced wrong answers were in fact correct. Not only did the subjects report that they thought their wrong answers were right; the brain scans seemed to confirm it: they showed greater activity in the problem-solving regions of the brain than in those areas associated with conscious decision-making. And the nonconformists who went against the group and gave correct answers showed heightened activity in the part of the brain associated with fear and anxiety.
Commenting on the implications of these experiments, author Susan Cain writes,
Many of our most important civic institutions, from elections to jury trials to the very idea of majority rule, depend on dissenting voices. But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think. (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking)
Groupthink, in other words, is dangerous to a free society. And we don’t always realize when we’re not thinking for ourselves.
Steeping one’s self in the objective truth of the Bible has the effect of leaching the wrong, evil and bad ideas implanted by groupthink to the surface over time. Biblical based homeschooling gives your children a head start toward that end. And yes, in the end, to a weirded out society, your normal children will look like the “clown” who refused to wear the bell-bottoms.