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> Learning how to be likeable is already difficult enough for kids who have social opportunities all day every day.

As someone else pointed out, it's not clear that school helps with this. The kid who went to school and didn't learn this is not at all an outlier. There are quite a few in every class. What would be interesting is if there is research to indicate which suffers more: The kid who doesn't learn this and has to go through school, or the homeschooled kid who doesn't learn this and doesn't have to deal with it in school.

Agreed on the tutor thing at high school, although for many homeschooled kids I know, it was usually one of:

1. Send kids to a regular high school (i.e. don't home school those years)

2. Lots of schools in this area have programs that allow homeschooled kids to attend classes in the areas their parents cannot teach. Of course, rules on this vary from state to state.

>As someone else pointed out, it's not clear that school helps with [learning how to be likeable]

The rebuttal to your point is so simple and obvious it's really hard to take you seriously. Socializing is a skill that can be practiced. If you have fewer opportunities to practice, you're less likely to get better. The children that are bad at socializing despite going to public school do not show that public school doesn't teach socializing, it means they didn't learn as much from their practice. For all you know, poorly-socialized public school children would have otherwise ended up living in their parents' basements until 45 or turned into serial killers if they were homeschooled. Public schooling doesn't need to guarantee good outcomes to be the more desirable choice.

The hard lesson I learned is that success in socializing as an adult is quite different from success in socializing in school. I don't make close friends with adults the way I did as a school kid. I had to unlearn a lot of my school life to succeed.

The school environment is a very artificial one, and not very comparable with much in the adult world. Those who stick to the rules learned there tend not to do well (also found out the hard way). For years I've tossed the idea in my head to write a blog post of all the life lessons one learns in school that lead to poor performance at work. Likewise, I'd like to write another post on all the lessons from school that often do translate to the work environment (because it was so ingrained in us), but which leads to suboptimal working conditions.

I can't obviously discount your experience, and my school experience was actually quite good - but just as you are aware of the downsides of home schooling, I'm aware of the downsides of schools.

If we go beyond anecdotes and to research, I believe most research is in favor of home schooling - both academically and socially.

There is no arguing with you people. The sort of things you miss out on if you're homeschooled are totally unimaginable to you so there isn't anything I can say that will change your stance unless you literally live through the experience. It has nothing to do with only comparing yourself to the median or upper quintile of public school socializers. The only way that position would seem reasonable to you is if you never met any homeschoolers or only talked to the parents, who obviously will be extremely hesitant to admit to mistakes because it makes them look bad.

There's also a huge and obvious problem with studying homeschooling. Part of the disadvantage is that each homeschool environment will be radically different because it's impossible to control for what a given home life is, the type of parent that would homeschool their child, and the sort of education they otherwise would have had if they weren't homeschooled. It's also really easy to track down all the homeschoolers that ended up going to college because that data is already gathered. It's a lot harder to track down all the homeschoolers that never left their parents basement or work the night shift at the 7/11 because they barely learned how to read, so you really can't say that "statistically" it's better or worse. Of course the data will be skewed so homeschoolers seem like higher performers.

I'll just add: It's a common mistake to compare yourself against people who are in the upper quintiles of the "other" category. When you compare your social skills with others, are you including the full spectrum of folks who go to school - including dropouts, etc?

> This means that for most parents, once your kid hits highschool you can't teach them anything outside of whatever you have a bachelor's in,

A bigger issue is that teaching (and teaching kids even moreso than adults) is itself a skill, and a skill lots of people with degrees don't have even in their degree field. The most successful homeschool parents I've known haven't used private tutors or been omnicompetent, but have been professional educators. Who, for those who weren't professional educators of children to start with, spent a lot of effort learning about child development abd childhood education to be successful at homeschooling.

if you haven't actually gone to school then how can you judge the benefits of the socialization it provides?

some of us prefer to socialize outside of school with kids that actually share our interests rather than being forced to interact with kids that we have nothing in common with.

school comes with bullying, peer pressure and a lot of other negatives in socialization that only the "normal" kids will get through relatively unscathed.

i count myself lucky that i only experienced mild bullying and being an outsider completely eliminated any issues of peer pressure for me as i simply had no need or desire to fit in.

there are plenty of other alternatives where you can socialize. be it boy/girl scouts, music classes, some sports or other activities.

of course, if you didn't get to participate in those either, then you really did miss out. i am sorry for that. your parents failed you at that point. however, if you think that school would have helped you, i would not be so sure about that.

To argue against your point that public school wouldn't have helped requires me to share really personal experiences. It's frustrating to be forced to share them over and over with people who probably won't take the time to actually learn from them.

I picked up social skills extremely quickly when I started college, but the first two years were absolutely abysmal to such a degree that I genuinely believed for a period that I had undiagnosed autism. I ended up turning out pretty gregarious and I'm probably average to above-average at making connections and coming off as normal by now, but an enormous amount of suffering could have been avoided. The social situations I was afforded as a child didn't provide nearly enough opportunity to learn and fail.

I had a glimpse of what the alternative would have been like because I got to take drivers' ed at a public school. You might think putting your kid in cub scouts or homeschool co-op is a substitute but it really isn't. If your kid only hangs out with homeschool kids they only get to see how the weird kids act. And if they're in cub scouts they're automatically at a disadvantage because a lot of the other kids are going to already know each other from school.

A lot of people like you come into the conversation asking to hear about the experiences of grown homeschooled children, but once they say something you don't like you suddenly turn into an expert on the subject because their lived experiences aren't representative of whatever you imagine homeschooling is like.

i don't think anyone's experience is representative of anything because everyone's experience is different. they are all anecdotes.

if we compare your and my story then apparently your homeschool experience matches my public school experience. how does that fit together?

i am not claiming that homeschooling would have been better for me, but only that it would not have been any worse.

it really depends on the individual character. maybe public school would have been better for you because it appears you are a social person, and all you lacked was an opportunity to learn those skills. i wasn't social to begin with, and what i needed was a group of equal peers. so yes, hanging out with other wierd kids would have been exactly what i needed, because i would have allowed me to make friends with someone. i could not get that from public school, because i was the only wierd kid there.

> school comes with bullying, peer pressure and a lot of other negatives in socialization that only the "normal" kids will get through relatively unscathed.

So does real life. People need experience dealing with these situations. IMO, it would be better to deal with them at school where you have parents & teachers to fall back on, rather than than waiting until you are an adult without nearly as much support.

parents are often helpless to deal with bullying in school because it depends on the teachers to actually do something about it.

all i learned about bullying in school is to distance myself from those idiots and subconsciously i probably also learned to avoid making friends. i don't see how that was helpful. i didn't experience real socialization until i entered university where i found actually like-minded individuals with common interest. and it's not true that there is less support when you are an adult. on the contrary. the friends i made in university were my support. i didn't have that before.

i am not complaining, my school experience wasn't that bad. but i seriously doubt that any form of home schooling would have been worse.

> So does real life.

As an adult, you usually have the option of walking away.

> People need experience dealing with these situations.

I think kids need to be taught the kind of self-respect such that they know when it is appropriate to deploy a healthy "go fuck yourself". Not clear that state schooling does a great job of this - indeed, if it's teaching them anything, it seems to be you are going to get bullied and you have no choice butto put up with it.