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"The average homeschooled kid is much more likely to miss social cues, stumble through a difficult interaction with feckless ineptitude, or even parrot their parents own myopic stereotypes or falsehoods."

Curious if this is something you have direct experience with/referencing a study or if you're just repeating the commonly held trope. I work at a school that has welcomed a large number of former home schoolers and I find your comment contrary to my experience with dozen of home school kids.

Additionally, describing public schools as a place where empathy, listening, and conflict resolution happens is counter to my experience working with public school districts. Genuinely interested to learn where you're coming from with your comment.

As a homeschooling parent, we hear this trope all the time and it has not been borne out by our experience at all. My wife and I probably both have above-average social skills, but our kids are all well-spoken, empathetic, and kind for their ages, and we tend to have to help them unlearn the social "skills" they learn from their friends who go to public school.

And we're not really sticklers when it comes to behavior, we mostly just want them to not be rude and to think about other people when they do things that impact other people, and we have not found that kids who attend public school are especially likely to possess those qualities. (I also went to public school and spent a good part of my early adulthood unlearning crappy social behavior that was learned in school).

As a former homeschooled child (K-10, I started attending community college in 11th grade) who is still in contact with many dozens of friends I met through homeschooling, I would agree. I would say that my homeschooled friends probably average just a bit better in the social skills department than my friends who attended private and public schools. That said, my homeschooled friends almost all came from middle-class, two-parent households from the suburbs, so my guess is that any advantage in those skills was more likely to be due to that than their schooling.

If you keep your kids locked at home 24/7 they will certainly have difficulty learning how to talk to other kids and adults, but nearly nobody does that. Most homeschooled families were involved in organized classes and activities with other families, even 20-30 years ago and my impression is that those experiences have only increased.

Isolating kids is bad, but modern schools are a very weird, artificial (and often unpleasant) social environment. Many of the social skills you learn in them are useless or even harmful:

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Also, homeschooling doesn't mean you can only learn from your parents. You can use any other resource that's available to you.

From the pg essay you linked:

> Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries.

So why is this a distinctly American problem? If we understand the answer to that question, might that help us solve the problem?

It's not. Don't trust someone with no relevant knowledge about the world telling you that the only place he has experience with is exceptional compared to the rest of the world.

> The average homeschooled kid is much more likely to miss social cues, stumble through a difficult interaction with feckless ineptitude, or even parrot their parents own myopic stereotypes or falsehoods.

"The average homeschooled kid". Stereotypes. Hm.

> I grew up homeschooled in NZ with a hilariously small amount of context for what the real world was like. In retrospect, it was totally ideal.

You missed the next sentence which seems to contradict the argument you're making. There's absolutely no evidence that the author is missing "critical thinking skills". It sounds like the positive reinforcement from the father created an idea that anything is possible (which probably is missing from most people who go through the traditional education system).

No one is arguing that all homeschooling is great. It's going to depend on the teachers/parents. This seems like an example where it worked out really well.

> Public schools work to immerse kids in a diverse environment with many people from many different walks of life.

Public schools are a reflection of the communities they're placed in and in much of rural America diversity isn't at play.

Astra Taylor's response to a critique (of the paywalled article below) demonstrates the nuance (https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/learning-in-...)

> I actually chose to go to public high school in Georgia for three years, where I saw the good and bad first hand. Unlike Goldstein, who glories in having “benefited from 13 years of public education in one of the most diverse and progressive school districts in the United States,” the school I attended was predominantly African-American and viciously segregated, with the white kids funneled into advanced and gifted courses while everyone else, the vast majority, languished. Thus, in my essay I ask, “Are schools social levelers or do they reinforce the class pyramid by tracking and sorting children from a young age?” Any honest progressive needs to admit the answer is both

Your take is kind of obvious, but it's too monolithic. There are certainly some of my old friends that match your description to the T: socially awkward, insular knowledge, holding onto their parent's religious extremes.

But they also have siblings that are polar opposites, for example one got a PhD in Evolutionary Bio (much to their parents ire).

I think you're absolutely right that money and class are at the center of this, 'yacht schooling' is definitely a thing and their experiences should not be extrapolated generally.

Paywalled, but these stories also worth a read and N+! is well worth the money. * https://nplusonemag.com/issue-33/essays/homeschool/ * https://nplusonemag.com/issue-13/essays/unschooling/

Exactly—one anecdote about homeschooling doesn’t apply generally. In the US, the average homeschooled kid is likely to be raised in a very religious family with little to no science education.

Absent the religiosity, the same can be said for the average public schooled kid.

The fact that homeschoolers in the US are likely to be religious also tells you nothing about homeschooling if done by someone who's not particularly religious and cares about science.

There are statistics out there about the academic performance of homeschoolers, and all the evidence out there shows that they have better academic performance than public school kids.

Even then, it's an uneven distribution. Homeschooled in Montana? Probably. Homeschooled in the Bay Area? Probably not.