Gullibility

My parents homeschooled me until high school. I loved it; it was pretty much the best thing ever. I got to stay at home and play (and do school, of course) outside or wherever I pleased, even when all of the other kids were stuck in classrooms learning. I learned tons, but it was a great thing to be able to take my book outside and read on the front porch or draw on the sidewalk with chalk or even blow bubbles that didn't pop immediately. Life was good.

I did discover one drawback to homeschooling, though: gullibility. A family moved next door to us with two children, both of whom were publicly schooled. The first thing they did when they met us was to play a prank on us. They pretended that one was mute, and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. I didn't figure out that the boy was not mute for days.

Another instance was when I and my brothers went to our church while our parents attended a meeting there. We played with another young boy who attended the same church, and he thought it would be a great idea to go find all of the "berries" (little blue and pink spheres that grew on weeds in the church lot) and collect them for our parents. He also convinced us that they would be good to eat...so we each had a few. Boy, did we get into trouble!

The list goes on, and I never seemed to learn. In fact, I am still somewhat gullible; the biggest thing to have made me more skeptical has been my education. Now, before you nod knowingly, no, it was not public school that made me more skeptical. I think that that has been due to a lot of English and writing courses in which I had to find reliable resources. The only thing that my one class in public school did for me was to make me hate all humanity. Okay, that is an exaggeration, but I did learn that I didn't like spending time around my peers. I much preferred talking with adults or playing with younger children.

I do have a point with all this. While I was thinking about my gullibility, I wondered a couple of things. First, is there a problem with credulity? After all, we are told that everyone is assumed innocent until proven guilty. Second, if there is a problem, from where does the problem originate? Does it originate with the naïve party, or does it lie with the party that is trying to deceive, even for a practical joke or prank?

While I will admit that I am at times too naïve, or at the very least I take things too seriously most of the time, I do think that homeschooling perhaps has a beautiful side effect that is sometimes undervalued. After all, the kids who successfully pranked me and my siblings must have learned it from somewhere and perhaps been on the receiving end at some point. Perhaps these things were among the most innocuous of the things they learned from their own peers.

What I'm getting at is that I don't think that innocence and naïveté are fundamentally bad. Actually, I wish we could have a more innocent and trusting society overall. Imagine that world for a moment. Imagine a world like the Garden of Eden in which no one had a reason to distrust anyone else. I think that that would be a world in which humor abounds but no one is the butt of any jokes. Imagine taking everything seriously but laughing at the world. Does that sound like a paradox? Perhaps it is, but I think that it is an ideal.