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For me the value in high school was more about making friends than anything else. As far as the actual curriculum there was some value getting a taste of things I would never have really looked at otherwise. Accounting, wood working, and gourmet cooking have come in handy in my normal life. Oddly enough, nothing that I learned in computer classes has helped me.

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Exactly, it is to my firm uneducated belief that school is 80% socializing and 20% education. Where people really learn is at home, doing homework.

Well, in that case I didn't learn much in high school, I avoided homework like the plague.

I struggle with the "socialization" argument for school. It's an institutional environment systemically stratified by age. How in any way does this model community life outside of school?

Compared to homeschooling in a class of one, school is a more social environment. Learning with only those your own age, taught almost exclusively by women between 25-50 (65 at most, but rarely)--is that not an odd way to structure a human environment?

In my anecdotal experience, put a school age kid with a young toddler, or a senior over the age of 70, and an empathy switch gets turned on. This kind of socialization is undervalued.

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