I've never met a home-schooled kid who wasn't social awkward. I really hate the current education system, but I also recognize that the social skills developed there are almost as important as the formal education kids get.. perhaps even more so.
Many families homeschool because they want to intentionally "protect"/isolate their children from the mainstream. This is very common with religious families that choose to homeschool so their kids (1) are exposed to the family's values and belief system to the exclusion of others, and (2) aren't corrupted by the evils of the outside world. That's a perfect recipe for social awkwardness.
Isolation is not a primary component of the homeschooling/unschooling approach. In fact, if your goal is to expose your kids to as many cool things and people as possible, more unstructured time doing things in the real world may actually make them more socially skilled than their peers.
According to a 2001 U.S. Census survey, 33% of homeschooling households cited religion as a factor in their choice, 14% objected to what the school teaches (i.e things like evolution), and 9% cited morality. (See data at http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0053/... and http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0053/...)
In a 1999 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, only 48.9% of US homeschooling parents cited "Can give child better education at home" as the primary reason for homeschooling. That means 51.1% of homeschooling parents in the US think their kids would get a better education at school, but choose to homeschool for other reasons, which are primarily religious/moral in nature.
I'm not saying all homeschooling parents (which includes all religious homeschooling parents) want to isolate their children. The point is that, for a non-trivial percentage of parents, removing their children from the mainstream is a primary motivation for homeschooling.
No, that's not what it means.
It means 48.9% thinks "better education" is their main reason for homeschooling. For the other 51.1%, "better education" is not the main reason, but may still be on the list.
It's true that a non-trivial percentage want to isolate their children from the mainstream, but please do not misrepresent the statistics to make your point.
That means that 51.1% of parents surveyed did not mark "quality of education" as a reason they chose to homeschool - it was on the list as an option they could have marked, and they chose not to pick it. That's pretty telling, IMO.
Because they don't list that their motivation was that they can do better than a public school does not mean that they believe they will do worse.
Consider the case of someone sending their child to a French immersion school. Most would not say that the immersion school is better than all other schools, but that doesn't mean they believe they believe it is worse. Likely they are sending their children there because they want them to learn to speak French fluently, not because they believe other schools are worse.
Here's a more recent study from the US Department of Education:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/TableDisplay.asp?Tabl...
This 2003 study is considered to be far superior to the 1999 one cited for reasons discussed in this article:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/parentsreasons.asp
For example, on the 1999 study two flaws listed are "when faced with an open-ended question, parents may not have recalled or responded with all of the reasons for homeschooling that were applicable to their situation" and "parents were not specifically asked to report their primary reason for homeschooling".
As you can see the 2003 study addresses these procedural errors and breaks out factors cited at all separately from those cited as primary concern.
The most listed factor for both was environmental factors in other schools, meaning "safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure". This was a concern of 85.4% of families, and the most important factor for 31.2%.
Dissatisfaction with academic quality of other schools was a factor in 68.2% of families, but a primary reason in only 16.5%
Regarding the assumptions made previously that any included component of religious or moral instruction implies isolationism and a lack of socialization, that claim is not supported by studies.
Unless you go around asking people about where they went to school all the time, unless someone is so socially awkward that it causes you to question whether they had some sort of "different" upbringing, you'd never know whether someone was homeschooled.
It may be that a lot of socially awkward people were homeschooled, but that doesn't necessarily indicate that the other way is true. A kid who is struggling and obviously hating traditional school might be more likely to get pulled out and homeschooled by their parents, or families who are isolated for other reasons (politics, religion, etc.) may homeschool, but none of these demonstrate a causative link between homeschooling -> poor socialization.
I guess you haven't met any of the hundreds of homeschooled kids I have met. To most parents who closely observe the social environment at many schools, it's easy to set up better situations for social learning through a family's own active social interaction with neighbors, friends, teammates, and colleagues in the community. Many homeschoolers, when they are asked, "What about socialization?" respond by saying, "It's one of the reasons I am happy I homeschool."
We weren't just kept to ourselves, though. We had weekly get-togethers with other homeschool families in the area, and in the summer we all were in various Parks & Rec sports leagues. Those probably helped us a lot.
Do you ask every non-awkward person you meet whether they were home-schooled? Do you ask every awkward person you meet whether they were home-schooled? Do you keep a running count?
Sounds like sample and/or confirmation bias.
I've seen this a few times. I assume you mean anecdotes told by liars? Surely a plurality of true statements constitutes data? The strength of that data for interpretation or prediction is limited by the number of data points, for sure, but I don't really get why this aphorism is supposed to be true.
Anecdotes are isolated instances, things people remember and tell because they are interesting. They lack any sort of statistical control or rigorous documentation. If you have a bunch of anecdotes about socially awkward homeschoolers, you don't have any actual data on the incidence of social awkwardness among homeschoolers. You just have have a bunch of anecdotes.
Anyway, I digress, anon.
Edit: I'm not the one claiming that all home schooled kids are like this. I'm just answering what social awkwardness means.
In theory, homeschooling allows these kids to develop their social skills in an environment with less risk of serious teasing/bullying. In practice, it depends on how the parents approach things.
The few I've met who are I've tended to find a bit autistic. I know kids from several families (I'm not in the USA) that homeschool and the kids tend to interact a lot better than state-school kids with different age groups - toddlers through to adults.
However, none of those I know are single children AFAIR.