>gain social skills and learn how to deal with people

Learning to get on with people is important but school isn't such a good place to do that.

The social atmosphere in schools is abysmal. A combination of obedience to authority and placating bullies. It's more like being in the army, or in prison, than a modern workplace or a group of friends. At least in a group of friends you can talk freely, without needing permission or being teased.

I think one learns more subtle and useful social skills from interacting with friends (i.e. voluntary relationships, where either party is free to leave) and from interacting with colleagues.

In my case, this occurred in the years just after school.

I won't say that school doesn't teach a certain amount of valuable knowledge, but that knowledge can be obtained elsewhere, without the huge overhead of learning to share space with bullies, thugs, and people in authority who think they know what is best for you.

And I haven't mentioned the enormous cost of schooling: 12 years of your young life (instead of doing more enjoyable things that you stand to learn far more from). And for most people, stunting of individuality and destruction of creativity (which cripples the ability to learn new things later in life).

I think most people just assume that schools are good places to learn social skills because they were forced to go through it themselves, so they had to embrace it at the time. After a while, they look back with nostalgia, forgetting how much boredom and fear they had to endure.

First of all, high school (for all its positives and negatives--and there are plenty of positives) is NOT the real world. Schools are the only places where there is such a high concentration of like-aged and experienced people. They are, especially in the U.S., carefully fabricated and constructed environments, often with their own sets of rules and regulations different from what one would expect any place else. (You need to raise your hand and ask permission to go to the bathroom? Someone can torment and bully you with impunity and its your own responsibility to learn to "deal" with it?)

Second, homeschoolers interact with many different kinds of people all of the time. Our kids play in community ensembles, participate in non-school sporting leagues, attend music and theater performances (during the day!), and experience the world with us in general. They have close friends their own age and younger and older.

The "home" and the "school" in homeschool is misleading. Many of us spend significant parts of our days out of the home. And to us (and I think to many other readers here) "school" is not synonymous with "learn". A school is a building or an institution. People don't learn because they are "in school", they learn because they want to (or need to, I guess).

We treat our own homeschooled kids as if they are, well, just people. My job as a parent is to provide for them (love, shelter, food, space--I'm an angel investor) and their job is to explore, learn, grow, adapt, think, do.

For us this works better without an institution involved.

The thing is: school is nothing like the real world. It teaches you how to deal with school.

School is a very weird, twisted little society where none of the work has any real point, there's no source of purpose other than pure social approval, and everybody is either the same age or an authority figure.

The strategies you use for dealing with difficult people in the real world are completely different from what you have to do in school. Same goes for how to find friends, or how to decide what to do.

That's precisely why everyone is always saying "it will get better after you get out of high school". Because the conditions in school are not at all representative of the rest of your life.

> [...] and everybody is either the same age or an authority figure.

At least nominally. Plenty of teachers turn into laughing stock.

"School is a very weird, twisted little society where none of the work has any real point"

Of course it has a point: learning. Whether it is successful in that end is up for debate :)

Just because high school is unpleasant for some and it will get better for them afterwards, does not mean none of the work has any real point, or that you learn nothing.

This is so very true.

While high school can be a social learning experience (an awkward one), the outcome of it may not be entirely positive.

In high school, I learned how to smoke, drink, fight, cheat and steal. I almost gave up programming as a hobby because it was weird in the eyes of my peers. I narrowly escaped a life of crime by moving to a different city as soon as I was old enough.

Man, I'm happy to be out of that shit and out of that neighborhood. And almost out of school (finishing my masters').

I would add that, if you have time to home school, you have time to help your kids build accomplishments that build confidence that carries through other people's crap.

A kid who achieves at sports / art / theater / computers / whatever has reason to _know_ they aren't little. Kids need help to organize themselves to achieve because the links between planning, persisting, studying fundamentals, spotting and handling emotional challenges and the emotional rewards are diffuse. It's hard to build the positive associations that build habits, and that's where parents can help. (Yes, it's hard to find the line between encouraging and demanding.)

Home schooling might be a necessary response to the schooling available. But social deprivation is a downside of any home schooling program, kids must learn to deal with other people. Better to meet frictions by building the kids up, rather than avoiding the frictions in the first place.

I think it's interesting to hear more about offensive homeschooling. For instance, my brother is a senior commercial pilot. He has two high school aged boys who have been homeschooled all their life. They play (American) football in the fall and spend the rest of the year traveling the country for competitive sailboat races and catching free flights to Asia, Africa, South America and more with their mom.

Totally agree, just want to add that their are different kind of schools and different kind of kids. If your kid really gets bullied, you can still change the school or send them to a fitting school in the first place. Not an ordinary high-school. "Just" have to make sure your kids would tell you.

An besides, even though bullying is unhealthy for the bullied kid, is a great experience to learn how that stops if you bash the right people, how to hack and influence society (maybe not something you want your kid to learn though).

"I understand that sheltering them from the real world is not your motivation for this opinion, but it is the reality of what will happen. Your kids will miss out on a huge period of personal growth and a large expansion of their experience dealing with other people which they will never be able to get back later."

It is not necessarily the case that being homeschooled automatically equates to a child that has been sheltered from the real world. In reality, whether or not a child has missed out due to homeschooling depends heavily on the parents that are doing the homeschooling. A parent can homeschool their child and simulate a private school by integrating classes (with groups of children) from museums, libraries, and independent instructors. A parent can also homeschool their child by putting on a DVD and walking away.

I was homeschooled from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. My parents relied on a lot of external classes to ensure that I was still able to develop the ability to interact with others. The reality for me was that I was able to have a far richer social environment as a result of my being homeschooled. By the time that I entered college, I had interacted with far more cultures and personality types than most of those around me. I went on to successfully complete my undergraduate and graduate degrees.

When I was homeschooled, I kept in contact with a small handful of friends that were also homeschooled. They all went on to do just fine in both college and in life. I realize that my experiences and those of my peers are anecdotal, but a study performed by the Discovery Institute in 2000 also provided evidence that there is no "sheltering" involved with most homeschools: http://www.discovery.org/a/3479

(Please note, I actually take issue with a few things in the Discovery Institute study, but I think that it does provide some degree of evidence that homeschooling does not automatically result in a maladjusted child.)

In my economics courses, we would sometimes take a look at the economic returns of education. I always found it strangely comical when someone would speak harshly about how homeschoolers are "sheltered" and then turn to me for moral support. It was always such a shock to everyone to hear that I had been homeschooled for my entire life. Some people even called me a liar outright. (I have always wondered what is it about homeschooling that seems to rub people the wrong way?)

I am well-spoken, outgoing, and have an easy time dealing with people. I do not say this (or anything else in this post) braggingly, but I say it to give credit to my parents for what their sacrifices were able to accomplish for me. You say that "sheltering" is the "reality" of what will happen, but how are you so sure of this?

I believe that the results of homeschooling, much like other forms of schooling, is a product of the teacher, the student, and the approach. I do not disagree that sometimes, with homeschooling, some children are not able to develop social skills. What I disagree with, strongly, is your insinuation that "sheltering is the reality of homeschool". Homeschooling a child does not automatically mean that the child will struggle socially.

You seriously just cited something from the Discovery Institute, a group that believes a book trumps scientific evidence? They have a strong agenda that includes homeschooling. The article you cited is not research, it's an internally created, non-peer reviewed meta review. Not exactly high quality material.

I'm not saying your argument is necessarily wrong, just that you found some of the worst possible material to support it.

My apologies.

I never intended anyone to take the Discovery Institute paper as anything more than just a casual study of the subject (by a biased party). I certainly did not want to present it as academically rigorous on any level or as an unbiased look at the subject.

I thought that I had made this clear in my original post by using the word "study" rather than "research" or "peer-reviewed study". I really meant for it to be taken as more of a narrative account than an actual research paper. Unfortunately, it is now far too late for me to amend my original post to make this more clear.

In my defense, I typed up my post in a blaze of coffee-fueled self-righteous indignation. Mistakes tend to happen a lot when you shoot from the hip like that.

Were you homeschooled for religious reasons, though? Because especially in certain areas, many homeschooled kids are in that situation only because their parents believe the public school system will force them to believe unacceptable things: the gay agenda, evolution, Jesus wasn't an American, etc.

It's that kind of homeschooling that rubs people the wrong way, because it is specifically motivated by a desire to shelter rather than educate (it's also precisely the reason the Discovery Institute cares about this issue at all; they don't want kids growing up in a system that normalizes homosexuality, religious diversity, or an evidence-based worldview). Most of the bizarrely maladjusted homeschooled kids that I knew came out of these types of situations (though that's not to say that all kids coming out of religiously motivated homeschooling were socially inept).

When parents homeschool because they actually think their kids will learn more effectively, that's a much more positive situation that I have no problem with.

Upvoted you both. Thank you for the civil disagreement that (unfortunately) is part of what makes HN special.