In defense of introverts!

Diversity? Really? Matt Walsh thinks maybe that's not what we want.

Maybe we’re not so committed to diversity, after all. In fact, maybe we detest diversity.

Matt applies this idea to those who are critical of homeschooling. Critics of homeschooling say that homeschooled children do not get properly socialized. Matt is a proponent of homeschooling.

In fact, kids who are homeschooled tend to be much better in “social situations” because they learned how to socialize from adults, rather than aping the personality traits of their peers.

But, critics are afraid that homeschoolers will be introverts!

If a kid is introverted he doesn’t need to be broken like a dog. He doesn’t need to change his personality. He doesn’t even need to “come out of his shell.” He’s not hiding in a shell. He just doesn’t feel the need to chatter incessantly with everyone in the room. If that makes you uncomfortable — that’s your problem. There’s nothing objectively preferable or superior about extroversion.

Put simply, an introvert is energized by being alone or in small groups, where he or she can think, create and contemplate. An extrovert finds fulfillment primarily in large groups, and generally hates being alone. It’s more complicated than this, obviously, but I’m just hitting the basics. The crucial point is that introversion has nothing to do with fear, and extroversion has nothing to do with boldness or courage.

Walsh goes on to write the best defense of introverts I have ever read.

I’m not saying all introverts are towering geniuses — I’m living proof that it doesn’t always work that way — but, still, your 5th grade introvert might have beautiful intellectual gifts that don’t include being naturally outgoing. Who cares? He won’t make a great salesman, so what? His personality is an asset in so many ways, even if the world says otherwise. The world doesn’t know what it’s talking about. The world doesn’t know that it’s been shaped and transformed by those weird, shy introverts. So, no, there isn’t anything defective about those quiet kids in class. But there might be something brilliant about them. They might be able to think and create incredible things in their quiet mind, inside that “shell,” up in that mysterious head of theirs.

The next time you think there’s something wrong with being introverted, pick up a biography of Ghandi, or JK Rowling, or Warren Buffett, or Thomas Aquinas, or Abraham Lincoln, and then reconsider your assessment. We might not light up the room, but we can change the world.