I don't always feel great about sending my kid to school, but until you can get a critical mass for some kind of alternative, the cost in social isolation for keeping kids out of school seems way too high to me.
Anyway, the socialization taught in school is often the wrong type of socialization. "here is how to talk and play only with kids your own age".
I will also mention: we have 5 kids. Oldest now in college, youngest in 4th grade.
Ben Sasse’s book “the Vanishing American Adult” points out that the modern child-centric school system is an extremely recent invention. Back in the day, children were socialized by hanging out around adults who could teach them how to be humans.
If my wife and I cared more about our kids we’d home school them.
The people who are supposed to be overseeing this and averting this mess generally have other concerns, limiting their ability and willingness to intercede.
Really, the only changes are the time-horizon and how the social groups are sorted.
I've found this to be a pretty apt generalization in literally every place I've lived, which at this point encompasses a half-dozen major cities spread out over several thousand miles.
Minimal differences, really.
Obsessed? Some. Aware? Everyone is aware of them, consciously or not.
> because it determines everything about your life - who you can talk to, who you can date, who you can work with, etc.
I mean, sort of. It’s always present in these determinations, but it’s only one factor.
I believe you’re right to say that some exposure to a status-focused microcosm is good for understanding how to navigate society, but I really don’t think it’s as extreme as you make it out to be.
In adulthood it more based on one's ability to actually perform socially useful activities. Not 100% obviously, but a lot more than childhood.
My wife says that they were all incredible awkward to be around, so there may be something to the social thing.
You have a point there. In regular school you are forced to be 'social' or risk punishment. I put 'social' in quotes because I think what is considered social is subjective and mostly made up. But watching how people are treating one another in this world I'm not sure if that social component is really working out good. Homeschooled kids are definitely not as slavishly as the 'socially' drilled kids from regular school.
Behind? In what? We are homeschooling our daughter. For her age she's amazing with computers, english and painting/drawing(which is her passion), and also unlike her peers at school she learned to enjoy life long learning and has become autodidact as well. She never learned the usual things taught at school like: forcing other people what to do, bullying, all day on social media, hate to learn, etc, etc..
I'd suggest that social development can be served by literally just playing with friends though. In our area, the YMCA offers sports basically the whole year, which is a good way for the kids to spend time in a structured group setting (and if you're lucky, you can even be the coach!), and my wife has found plenty of fellow homeschoolers and unschoolers on FB who are looking for some social interaction for their kids (we happen to live in a place that isn't particularly religious though).
Relatedly, everyone just seems to agree that the socialization provided by school is good and necessary, and I'm not so sure that's true. It's been our experience that all of our friends and relatives, when they do complain about school, complain about bullying or kids otherwise misbehaving in a way that's stressful to the child in question.
In addition, our experience on the playground has been that kids who are in school tend to be way more likely to be rude and aggressive. And I don't say this to suggest that school makes kids rude and aggressive, just that I have 4 kids and I have spent a lot of time around a lot of different kids and I've seen zero evidence that school provides positive socialization beyond what could be had by attending regular play groups.
That is, socialization in the public school system very much has a downside.
I mostly just want to remove socialization as the deciding factor that makes parents keep their kids in school when they'd really rather do something else, because, as you say, socialization in public school very much has a downside, and I think at best, it's a wash compared to homeschool.
And if you shield kids too much such as by over structuring their life, they might be defenseless later on. It's a fine balance and requires care, care which neither schools nor homeschooling parents are likely to be able to provide. Not even specialists most likely.
It's an open question.
Also, school is a terrible place to socialize.
On the other hand, "being terrible" is also not exactly a great reason to stick kids in school...
We could waste people's time considerably less than we currently do, but it would require a sober look at what people are capable of and tracking them into vocational training that matches their abilities much earlier than we do, rather than sticking our fingers in our ears and singing "lalala everyone should go to college."
This is really wrong attitude. Success sometimes depends on a small push at a particular time.