But what about socialization?

Every homeschooling parent is tired of hearing that question. Folks seem to think it's good for children to spend all day with their age-peers. One of our standard replies is that we're aiming more for civilization than socialization.

In his February 2006 essay about Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Theodore Dalrymple, a retired prison psychiatrist, described one of the common effects of g-school socialization:

And Mr. Burgess foresaw the importance that the youth culture would attach to sexual precocity and a kind of disabused knowingness. It would not have surprised Mr. Burgess that magazines for 10- or 11-year-old girls are now full of advice about how to make themselves sexually attractive, or that girls of 6 or 7 are dressed by their single mothers in costumes redolent of prostitution.

The precocity necessary to avoid humiliation by peers prevents young people from maturing further and leaves them in a state of petrified adolescence. Persuaded that they already know all that is necessary, they are disabused about everything, for fear of appearing naive.

With no deeper interests, they are prey to gusts of hysterical and childish enthusiasm; only increasingly extreme sensations can arouse them from their mental torpor. Hence the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has followed in the wake of the youth culture.

The world in which youth culture predominates and precocity is the highest achievement is one in which all tenderness is absent. When Alex and his gang attack the teacher, they find a letter in his pocket, which one of them reads out derisively: "My darling one ... I shall be thinking of you while you are away and hope you will remember to wrap up warm when you go out at night."

Such simple and heartfelt affection and concern for another person are extinct in the world of Alex and his droogs. Self-absorbed, Alex is self-pitying but has no pity for others. All relations with other human beings are instrumental means to a selfish, brutal, hedonistic end.