Originally Posted by: PonyOnepains me to say it, especially as an advocate of education policy reform and of alternative education methods but i cannot recall a person i've known who was home schooled who wasn't noticeably "off" somehow. a lot of them do seem to be overbearingly religious (as renisen noted) and a lot of people, religious or not, seem to have been home schooled by overprotective parents who instilled a sharp fear of the world around them. pity. with the quality of public education nowadays, it seems as though a lot of people could have gotten a better education sitting under a tree by a pond playing a banjo than they did waking up at 7am, shuffling through classes for 8 hours and then going home and having to stay up all night doing mindless busywork.

all IMHO, but then i was the guy who dropped out and got his GED then started working because he was sick of having no challenges whatsoever in class.

i think that a lot of girls are turned off from guitar - especially electric - because of it's "manly" aura; to the uneducated person, an "electric guitar" isn't something that can be used for a billion types of music, it's a loud, crude instrument that you use to wail full-metal misfortune about satan and death on the masses with. they think of the type of person who plays electric guitar and they think of a guy with long, greasy hair who drinks and takes drugs prodigiously, is brain dead (other than his knowledge of the instrument), unhygenic, loud, vulgar, uncultured, and aggressive. NOTE: the first person to insert something about how i described them is hereby declared beforehand to NOT BE FUNNY OR CLEVER and receive the virtual equivalent of a bitch slap

i think this image of the electric guitar as a "manly" instrument turns a lot of girls off from it, and then also turns a lot of girls onto it who don't really care about the instrument or even want to play it, but, who want to prove they can "hang." a guitarist friend of mine once asked a girl who had a gig bag what kind of guitar she had on the subway, and was treated to a torrent of "i'm not interested in dating you, what kind of guitar i play is none of your business and i'm better than you anyway." ouch.

further, often a girl who plays the electric guitar has a hard time not being thought of as a musical also-ran or a wannabe-metal dude, and this would make it way more difficult for her to be taken seriously. imagine if you played a song for your parents that you poured your heart and soul into and they reacted with "aww, cute." well, imagine you're a 110 lb girl with a ponytail who writes an awesome riff, and you play it for your male friends and they think it's "cute" or "sexy," whereas if one of their other male friends played it it would be "sick" or "awesome."

it seems to be different with acoustic guitars; maybe because their tone is more commonly associated in pop culture with an earthy, liberal, all-natural audience who is supposedly open to art and things that go against tradition, and also that in many circles the acoustic guitar is thought of as a sophisticated, graceful, calm instrument as opposed to the electric being vulgar, loud, and unruly; the difference between a ballerina doing swan lake and a punk slam dancing.

i don't get why it is that so many girls have adopted bass. when my sister, who's now 17, wanted to branch out from violin, she chose a bass. i got her a Yamaha of some sort, i don't remember exactly the model, and an SWR LA series amp. no interest in guitar whatsoever. and 4 of her female friends also have basses. weird.

what makes it even more strange is that while now, guitar and bass seem to be percieved as "manly" instruments and violin, mandolin, and piano as "girly" it was the other way around at the turn of the century. i've seen numerous woodcuts and prints of women playing guitars and very few of men playing.