Others views on homeschooling

So last night I watched the new episode of Wife Swap and the guinea pigs were:
1. A superficial family obsessed with looks, baby beauty pagents and winning 1st place.
VS.
2. A feminist doctor and her stay-at-home husband who unschooled the girls.

It is always interesting to see what types of views mainstream society has about how "backwards" and "socially-inept" homeschoolers are. Granted, there is always some extreme cases (which always seem to make the news) but if you want to run to the other side of the school spectrum, look at all of the school shootings in the last several years.

Is THIS what we are supposed to be striving for? Conform or become a emotionally scarred social leper who will eventually act out to the point of killing people? I don't know, that seems like a pretty scary ultimatum to me.

Anyway, the superficial father said something along the lines of, the only homeschoolers he had ever met where unable to interact with the people around them and were uncivilized. However, this man stuttered every other sentence, didn't seem to understand sarcasam and was visibly intimidated by the feminist who expressed her opinions on a woman feeling obligated to clean the house in "hooker boots".

The scene that took the cake was when the feminist-mom was forced to enter superficial-baby (13 months old) into a beauty pagent and when she did NOT win first place, the 7 year old brother and FATHER were to the point of tears?!?!?! The 7 year old said, "If you aren't first, you are a loser".

At the other house, superficial-mom decided to enter feminist-girls into a beauty pagent. She primped, trained, and dressed them to the hilt. The big day came and they competed, lost and above all had FUN. Superficial mom had a light-bulb come on and realized that winning and looks are NOT the most important thing and cried over her behavior towards her son. She would yell at him and tell him he was not good enough when he lost. Way to bolster your child's self-worth there!

The interesting thing about this show is it seems like the people who are most interested in trying to change others to be just like them really end up seeing the flaws in their own life. Maybe they feel insecure about their own choices and safety in numbers gives them a false sense of reassurance that they must be doing an okay job if everyone else does it.....right?

The other interesting point is that this show definatly seeks out the most extreme families and homeschoolers do make it on quite frequently. So does that mean that main-stream society views us all as crazy, or there are more of us out there than we really realize? But kudos to them for finding a family that isn't uber-religious or under-educated hippies. Not that there is something wrong with them; it is just that they aren't the ONLY type of "crazy" homeschooler out there :-) Because remember, after our children have learned to eat, walk, talk etc and then turn 5, we suddenly become too stupid to teach them anything else without the "experts".

Okay, well back to the letter of inquiry I am trying to avoid!