Holly’s telling me a story about a younger friend, early 20s, who dropped out of high school (or was booted). He’s a friend of her boyrfiend. She was telling me he was smart, but had asked her the dumbest question.

When she said she had never gone to school, he said “How did you learn to talk?”

So Holly said he wasn’t attached to that question, but it was the first thing that popped into his head, and then they talked about more sensible aspects of learning. :-)
And she figures he has had no reason to know or think much about child development.:-)

I thought I’d share it as an amusement.

Before this, Holly’s best bad example was having been at a free-lunch gathering in a park when she was 11 or so, and a kid she was hanging out with, in a group, asking her if she didn’t go to school, how did she make friends? Holly had reached out, shook her hand, and said “Hi! I’m Holly.”

The girl looked at her blankly, Holly said. She didn’t get it.

So what kinds of questions have you heard about “but if you didn’t go to school…”? I think many of the questions come from a moment of sort of mental white-out—the shock of first thoughts about something that has the potential to undo the person’s whole world, so let’s don’t judge them too harshly. It’s not usually the sort of question someone has thought of for a week in preparation for the conversation. :-)

Sandra

Here in Ireland, catholic religious education is part of the school curriculum. My brother-in-law was quite bothered and asked me how my kids were ever going to get married because they wouldn’t have the “first communion” and “confirmation” documents to be married by a priest in a Catholic Church. I explained that non-catholics also get married, and it was fine. It just did not compute for him.

Those are more amusing than mine. The one I've gotten more recently is "How will they learn to read?" I have a lot of friends who homeschool or are thinking about homeschooling and a few of them put their children in public school with the plan to withdraw them in a few years to homeschool once they have learned to read.
Another one I've gotten recently was if I was afraid that without school my child will turn out a bit "weird" because my age group grew up in the 1990s when homeschooling was not very common except for a few of our peers who were very unique or eccentric. I wasn't quite sure what to say to that...but I made the suggestion that perhaps more children would turn out to be different or eccentric except the school system forces them into conformity.