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I was homeschooled from 2nd grade up all the way through high school.

I've seen kids destroyed by home schooling and I've seen kids saved by home schooling. You are absolutely correct that the potential is there but not always realized.

Homeschooling shines when the parents play to it's strengths.

* Individually tailored education at the elementary level provides a huge boost to many kids.

* An environment that stresses and promotes self directed learning at the high school level also does wonders for a teenagers future. Done right home schooling encourages, rather than discourages, thinking for themselves through debate and conversation with adults.

* Lack of social grace while it exists for some kids is far from the norm. So far from the norm that I consider it a myth. It gets trotted out in almost every discussion I encounter around home schooling. And yet for the overwhelming majority of Home Schooled kids it couldn't be farther from the truth. In fact I think that in many ways Social Skills can be one of the biggest advantages a Home Schooled child can have.

Most kids learn to socialize from their friends. Those friends have no more idea than they do though. When they get their first job and/or attend college they have to learn all over again how to interact with adults.

A home schooled child tends to learn to socialize from other adults. The number 1 thing most people noticed about me and other Home Schooled people I've known was how well we could hold a conversation with an adult.

I've seen kids end up far too sheltered and harmed as a result but this is much less of a danger than most people think in my experience.

The #1 thing to keep consider though if you are thinking about homeschooling is the time commitment. You will probably need one parent to commit to it full time because it's a lot of work.

I went to a magnet high-school, and there were enough homeschooled kids who first went to public school there in 9th grade (or first since early elementary anyway) that I could make some observations:

For a few weeks, there was a definite gap in social grace as the homeschooled kids adjusted to cultural norms. After that, a significant fraction were fitting in just fine. It is true that a larger fraction of the homeschooled kids were awkard than the non-homeschooled kids after this adjustment period, but there is significant selection bias here; I know for a fact that a few of those kids were pulled from early elementary school because they were awkward and getting bullied, so the cause/effect is potentially reversed there.

This awkwardness might actually be a good thing, to a degree.

As a homeschooled kid I never quite lost this 'awkwardness' upon entering the 'normal' school system. A big part of this awkwardness, for me, comes from an inability or lack of desire to conform to social behavior that seems pointless or downright negative.

While I'm happy that I did go to a normal school eventually, and that I did learn how to fit in, I'm very happy with the fact that I seem to never lose a sense of (healthy?) skepticism, detachment, and dislike for many social behaviors around me.

And while this is anecdotal, if I look at my younger siblings (who spent more time in the public school systems), there does seem to be a strong correlation between how much time they spent in public school, and how creative, inventive, eager to learn, and 'subversive' they are. And that in turn seems to correlate with how close their actual lifestyle fits their desired lifestyle.

A number of my friends were also homeschooled, had to go through 'special' schools, or dropped out early. They all seem to have a similar 'awkwardness' in society, and they all seem to benefit from in similar ways. The biggest downside I've noticed is that those who spent too much time outside 'normal society' find it so hard to conform even a little that it causes problems in their life.

But a healthy mix of homeschooling and social life (sports, etc.) might solve much of that.

Oh absolutely a home schooled kid thrust into a regular school environment will seem awkward at first before they adjusted. This is more due to the fact that the social norms of a high school are most definitely not the social norms of most of society. I think home school kids learn the latter first and the former only if they get placed into an environment where they need to.

One set of social norms will serve them throughout life. The other is only useful for surviving till graduation.

I think most home schoolers that I talk to know all these dangers, and have developed ways around it. For one thing, a single homeschooling parent is rare in my area. There are tons of coops and other groups who get together on a regular basis. Each parent reaches what they know, there are social gatherings, and the parent can support each other while the kids learn.

Also, much more curriculum is available online these days, including online schools so you can have a teacher helping your child through their work, even while home schooled. The online coursework also reduces how much you need to be the teacher... but does not completely replace it.

We have our kids that home school do the bulk of their work online, and then I review their progress and their areas of struggle, and help them specifically with problem areas, then they go read and write for a while,m and spend the afternoon with less structured time to follow their own interests.

It isn't perfect, and you do need to make sure your children are getting a good education. But that is also true of sending your kids to a school. As a parent, we are responsible for the education, no matter where they actually sit during the day.

Same here, we have a dozen coops, and homeschool groups everywhere. Plus we are in a techi area, so occasionally my wife comes back from an outing, telling me about this new family she just met...turns out I know the dad as he is a programmer in the area.

As for single parent homeschooling...I can't even imagine. Homeschooling is my wife's job, that is what we call it. Anything less is a disservice to the kids.

> 2. Inherited ignorance – if the parents don’t know or care much about history, unbiased politics, mathematics, literature, etc. then the kids won’t either

It's even worse when parents care very much about giving their children wrong information about topics. Many people I know were homeschooled by conservative Christians who specifically wanted their children to believe things that are not actually true: that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that condoms are not effective at preventing pregnancy and tranmissions of STIs, that America's founding fathers intended the place to be a Christian theocracy, that the Bible gives a complete and accurate account of ancient history, and so on.

This statement really comes across as bigoted, and really just gives ammunition to people looking for excuses to withdraw from society.

It takes all kinds to make up a society. You might think that an 18% pregnancy rate (check wikipedia) for typical condom use is 'effective', but others may not. You may not like what the Bible has to say, but others probably have a different view. I don't see many Lutherans or Baptists running around blowing up planes or burning down villages, but I do see alot of them involved in the community in helpful ways, so I'm not too worried that they may be passing their beliefs down to their children.

iak8god isn't bigoted. Hardcore Christians do an incredible disservice to their children when the homeschool. My friend grew up in a Christian household and, while he wasn't homeschooled, he was told that "science is bullshit propaganda and we don't care if you don't do well in public school science". At this point he's an atheist and he's pissed at his parents for it.

Yeah, they might be decent and kind people. But being kind and decent is not a replacement for being effective.

> I don't see many Lutherans or Baptists running around blowing up planes or burning down villages,

Lutherans do get a mostly free pass, but you should listen to this: http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-48-prophet...

I suspect that there's a correlation between the amount of secular education given to (or forced upon) a religious population and how peaceful they are.

The history of the 20th century would disagree. Cambodian killing field, Soviet gulag, cultural revolution. The most rabid secular governments were among the most brutal. Look at what's been happening in North Korea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

GP said secular education, not secular government.

Did Pol Pot, Stalin etc. Commit these acts BECAUSE they were nonreligious, or was this simply another aspect of their character?

If the latter, one could equally point out that these people were male or non-American, or under six feet tall or liked three sugars in their tea or any other attribute and would be equally meaningful.

I'd argue North Korea isn't a secular government. The Kims are portrayed to their people as a lineage of gods under the divine authority of Kim Il-Sung, and their people are forced to literally worship them.

Stalin's government was also very anti-religion, but it was based on portraying him as a secular divine figure, "infallible sage, 'the greatest leader', 'sublime strategist of all times and nations'", etc.

The good thing is that flavor of homeschooling is fairly rare. Growing up my parent were involved in a fairly rare/fringe homeschooling movement (IBLP/ATI) that espoused all the things that ika8god mentioned. Out of the ~30 families in our area homeschool coop I think only 4 were that far out.

Oh my gosh, ATI. I had some friends who were into that, and I even borrowed their Sacred Texts that showed with diagrams how boys and girls should dress. I was homeschooled but those guys were out there.

Made it hard to make friends though, since a good portion of our group was ATI. I was kind of an outcast because I listened to music that had drums in it.

I find it hard to believe there are still people getting brought up under this kind of stuff.

http://store.iblp.org/product/ZHABE.html

Edit: I believe it, just find it really sad.

Extremists might be rare, but over 80% of families who choose homeschooling do so for religious reasons. Based on the quality of this curriculum that I've seen, those children are being done a disservice.

They might be able to score well on a GED or other standardized test, but they are not being given a real education.

most of my knowledge of this area is anecdotal (and personal). but it feels like, comparatively, that homeschooling as a methodology isn't doing a worse job than public institutions, as I've met people educated on both sides, some who have turned out great and some who have turned out not as great.

also, i was homeschooled (all 12 grades) and have a lot of homeschooled friends and general acquaintances. sure, some hold beliefs about origins that differ from the mainstream (i in fact, hold beliefs that differ from the main stream), and some decided to pursue careers and paths in life that did not require intense scientific inquiry, but many chose very scientific fields (doctorates in chemistry, biology, graduate degrees in math and engineering).

nearly all of them are productive members of society who can read, write and to varying degrees reason and think and act responsibly.

i say all that because, it feels like you're using "a real education" as a pejorative. but my experience has shown that most of the time, these people do get a "real education". what a person chooses to do with the knowledge he/she is given is entirely up to them.

my friends aren't unaware of the arguments for/against origins, global warming, etc... and they may be wrong, but that isn't because they weren't educated.

I also wouldn't say that these are hardcore Christians. A lot of the beliefs people think are hardcore are stereotypical apologetic stock arguments found on many Christian websites, popular Christian literature, or churches. And those Christians who do believe otherwise tend to not speak up.

One can just look at polling organizations who look at Christian opinions on the trustworthiness of science, age of the earth, climate change and ecological responsibility, evolution, vaccination, secularism, gay marriage, and so on. You're going to find that these Christians have been exaggerated as fringe, when they are in fact a substantial minority, and sometimes a fair majority.

That's why politicians still talk about this stuff. That's why during election season, this stuff shows up on multi-million dollar advertising campaigns, sometimes in the form of sinister but subtle implications of things to fear, like gay people molesting kids, or public schools as centers for secularist brainwashing (the place where you're going to lose control of your kid's religiosity). People know that these issues cannot be explicitly talked about, so they talk in code.

> he was told that "science is bullshit propaganda and we don't care if you don't do well in public school science"

To be fair, public school science is mostly bullshit. I don't think you can teach science to young children as anything other than a rote memorization of facts, and that actively holds them back when they study "real science" in college. Personally, I'd ditch science from the curriculum and replace it with courses in logic and statistics.

Can you study "real science" without knowing the basic facts about atoms, elements/compounds and cells?

There's a strong argument you can't really learn it without first learning the math, and it really needs to be in the order of math, physics, chemistry and biology. If you can't reason about it, don't have the foundation of that order of topics, can't do problem sets, is it really anything more than "a rote memorization of facts"?

Really, in the normal US curriculum biology is exactly that, because it doesn't require any math to speak of, then comes general chemistry because you can get by with algebra, but you don't have any real understanding of atoms etc. because you haven't done physics, critically E&M, but also classical mechanics. Then normally algebra based physics, since the US math track is so slow calculus comes too late.

But that's cargo cult physics, no one in the real world does it without the calculus. Heck, Newton invented his calculus to do the physics for which he's even more famous for, right?

As I mention in my other comment in this sub-thread, I consider myself lucky that my high school physics class was an automatic A class where the teacher just talked with us for the whole period. I learned a lot of useful things without doing stuff I'd have to unlearn in college.

A cargo cult understanding is probably superior to no understanding because science operates at different levels of abstraction. Most programmers have a cargo cult understanding of hardware for example.

Well, I'm talking about three levels of "understanding":

The "physics for poets" level I graduated high school with (including a great book on quantum chemistry I checked out from my local college's library, I think). This is useful, albeit dangerous as I've been saying, and enough to thrive at MIT with.

The cargo cult algebra based physics, only used in "education". E.g. the difference between Sears, Zemansky and Young's University Physics vs. College Physics

And calculus based physics.

My claim is that if you were to rank order their usefulness, it would be calculus, poets and then algebra way behind. I'd like to hear from some people who went from algebra to calculus based physics how that worked for them. I certainly found learning physics for real with calculus to be a joy....

ADDED: As for programmers and systems types ... yeah. While electronics intrinsically does nothing for me, I've always studied hardware to know how to build programs and systems better, and that's done me very well.

And the level of understanding can be appalling, we've had several discussions recently about big clusters failing at load and being replaces by a single system, often a surplus desktop, because the programmer had a clue.

The Robinson Curriculum http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com/ is build entirely on that principle.

Robinson, who was primary research associate of the 20th Century's premier chemist, Linus Pauling, was forced to come up with something when his wife suddenly died. His thesis is that we now have something better to train the mind than the old classics of Latin and Greek and what was written in them. Math and science, but real science.

So the curriculum has an initial singular focus on reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic, with the reading selections bringing in the other stuff needed like history. The math focus is to get you through single variable calculus as fast as possible, and only then do you study calculus based physics and otherwise pick up additional math as you need it. If there's time before college, then chemistry. If there's even more time, statistical mechanics and/or "Call the CalTech bookstore and ask them what's the current textbook for the general biology class" (he's an alumn).

If the child gets interested in a particular science topic, say ants, treat it as a subject outside of the formal learning. Get him a significant professional book on the subject, which he of course won't initially understand all that much of, but will prompt him to start filling in the gaps (that worked for me when in the '70s I rather randomly got my hands on some books like one on rocketry circa. the '50s)

It's also designed to be non-labor intensive after initially teaching phonics and the math tables by rote, just grade the writing each school day, have the kids grade their own math work, and generally watch over them and e.g. make sure they're doing the reading (again, something forced on his family by the death of his wife, he could do most of this while doing his own science research).

It's very interesting, and I would have loved to have been taught this way as opposed to struggling in a school system which had a college track but which had abolished its "honors" classes because they were "racist" (this, despite in my year the school systems' best chess player being black), and that including no AP courses and a lot that granted automatic As, like Latin and physics (which was just as well for the latter, since algebra based physics is cargo cult science).

It's not a small miracle I learned just enough math to get accepted by MIT (which is not as intense as CalTech), and most of the other factors in the acceptance had nothing to do with my public schooling, such as geographic balance and demonstrating I could do serious science and (software) engineering projects.

algebra based physics is cargo cult science" - can you elaborate on this?

Stuff like force = mass * acceleration seems pretty fundamental.

Certainly some of it can be done with just algebra, but general classical mechanics requires the calculus. E.g. distance -> speed -> acceleration -> jerk (why flooring the accelerator of a car can be so much fun).

Or let's use Newton's infamous apple. We say that gravity exerts a force of kd/t^2 (in MKS 9.8 m/s^2), but to describe the motion of the apple....

If you want I can grab my copy of University Physics, skim it and go into more detail about what can and can't be done with just algebra.

WHAT?

I have a very hard time understanding what you're saying here (but it could be very interesting). Could you post screenshots of textbooks? Or proofs?

Errr, all I'm pointing out are a couple of related details of classical mechanics that require the calculus, basically Newton's 2nd Law of motion (ignoring jerk and beyond, which you might describe as acceleration of acceleration).

It is very interesting stuff, but I'd suggest studying the most basic bits of the calculus and classical mechanics if you want to go further (this is typically the first thing you're taught about both). At this level it's not all that hard.

We can all claim that "it's elementary" or "basic". Put up or shut up. :)

EDIT: At least link to something to support your rather opaque post.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_mechanics

http://www.amazon.com/Sears-Zemanskys-University-Physics-10t... (Inexpensive older edition that's a good choice for self-study; see also the associated Study Guides and Student Solutions Manuals).

Seriously, learn the very basics ("learn how the universe works" as I like to put it), for which I think there's no substitute, and what I'm saying will be clear. Or maybe find a "physics for poets" text that goes into these details, but that's an appeal to authority.

My schools effectively taught the scientific method, which is probably more important than anything else. It's useful for science and other critical thinking.

Sure, our science fair projects weren't really science, but it is a good developing block.

Now that certainly is useful, and I'm forever grateful for the 8th grade teacher who was also the middle school's assistant principal who taught me that (and who's younger brother did a good job with general chemistry in high school).

But echoing the general discussion, he was not able to convince the high school placement drones that I was ready for biology, so if not for a great Algebra I teacher I would have totally stagnated in 9th grade, and it was generally grim since I'd correctly realized in 1st grade my calling was science and was learning absolutely none of it that year (1974-5 academic year, the ARPANET was 5 years old with 46 IMPs on it (Interface Message Processors; they could support multiple computers, but few sites had more than 1-2).

Continuing, OK, now you know the scientific method. How far can you take that without math? How many of today's big scientific public policy issues require a fair amount of math (and physics) to really think about?

That rate for pregnancy that you quote is not per-use - it's for an entire year of imperfect (normal) condom usage. With better sex ed and more knowledge that can further be reduced substantially.

Plus, Lutherans and other christians did go around burning down villages and killing people. Christianity is no more enlightened than Islam in that respect. There are extremists in both faiths.

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/9313/9611/6384/truth_...

With perfect use, condoms still yield a pregnancy rate of 2% per year. I can't think of anything else with such life consequences where I'd think that is acceptable risk. I certainly wouldn't drive a car that had a 2% failure rate. You may have different opinions on the matter. That's what makes this country so great - we can still make our own choices, to include how we teach our own children about risk.

The comment lumping Islam and Christianity together is way off base. With Islam, the founder was a man of violence. With Christianity, the founder was a man who shunned violence.

So, while 'christians' have committed great acts of violence, they are certainly not acting in accord with the belief system they espouse, nor are they following the example of their founder. This just shows that people are not always motivated (good or bad) by the belief system they espouse. They have other motivations as well.

The question to ask is, how does a person's belief system instruct them in their life? Does their belief system sanction violence? coercive behavior? Or, does it invite the believer to change their behavior and act more constructively?

How many tens of millions of people did Stalin and Mao kill? These men were committed Atheists who sought to coercively convert anyone they could. Should it be acceptable to criticize Atheist parents who are homeschooling their children, simply because some Athiests did terrible things?

I know we all want to reach out and make sure that all children get the best shake at life, but the best way to do this is to support their parents.

> With perfect use, condoms still yield a pregnancy rate of 2% per year.

Change your brand of condoms ;-) More seriously, it's considered a good idea to use BOTH condoms and the pill.

> With Christianity, the founder was a man who shunned violence.

Except when he expelled the vendors from the temple apparently..

As for children education.. As an atheist I would teach my children about all the religions the many dead religions, the living religions, the cults, the non-religious opinions (atheism, agnosticism), somehow I doubt that most religious people do that..

A car with a 2% failure rate would break down on average once every 50 years. How many cars from 1965 are still running today?

It's not really bigoted, but the evolution fight is used as a standard in the culture war. I have six friends from the same family that were all taught creationism and they still have better critical thinking skills than the average kid with a public education ends up with.

to be clear I think creationism is stupid and insupportable, but it didn't end up hurting them that bad and I know plenty of people with "better" educations that don't seem to be inoculated against believing stupid stuff. For instance, people I know that have expressed skepticism about vaccinations are evenly split between people I would classify as "conservative Christian" and "progressive".

Just like you I also have plenty of anecdotes.

I wasn't asserting a universal claim other than that believing some stupid things doesn't mean you're uneducated or stupid with regards to other things.

You might want to read this [0]. It starts:

As someone who participated in the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, I can tell you that you can’t understand the modern Republican Party and its hatred of government unless you understand the evangelical home-school movement.

[0] http://www.salon.com/2015/01/20/the_rights_home_school_consp...

Salon... where I would definitely go for a straight forward and honest view of something on the right. The place to go to reaffirm your hatred of people who you disagree with.

It was neat how he worked in the evil Kochmonsters at the end there. And Halliburton. And Palin. Great article... next up, a FreeRepublic discussion of public unions...

Indeed.

Any essay discussing this topic without mentioning Jimmy Carter siccing the IRS on Christian schools is ... by someone not quite inhabiting the same universe as I do.

Maybe. This essay doesn't really go into that, its thesis at 0th approximation is that Christians setting up an independent school system/society is axiomatically illegitimate ("diversity", as many have noted, doesn't extend to thought/worldviews/ideology, and "liberalism" or whatever you want to call it is a competing non-religion religion every bit as doctrinaire and severe as these Christians').

But the article claims that this had an outsized affect on politics and particularly the Republican party, and that simply would not have happened without Carter's action.

"Live and let live" is an old and sound American tradition. Taking people's children away from them, in wherever on the scale of figurative to literal in this case you'd put it ... well, you might as well try it with a mother bear and her cubs. That's what really energized the Religious Right in politics, and why its time in the sun was so short.

Frank Schaeffer has better first-hand knowledge of this topic than just about anyone else alive. Wikipedia[1] would be a fine place to start educating yourself about his and his father's outsized roles in the formation of the religious right.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Schaeffer#Political_ac...

> I don't see many Lutherans or Baptists running around blowing up planes or burning down villages,

If you don't see Christian terrorism (including in the U.S.), its because you aren't paying attention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_terrorism

Still upset about the gunpowder plot in 1605? If that page covers the worst of Christian terrorism, it is a vindication. There will always be crazies co-opting ideologies. The problem is you could write a wiki page about 10 times that long on muslim terror acts in the last year.

> Still upset about the gunpowder plot in 1605?

No, Oklahoma City is quite enough, thank you, as is the continued campaign against gay and trans rights, which is only nonviolent because the violence isn't reported on as part of a coherent campaign.

>You might think that an 18% pregnancy rate (check wikipedia)

That's if you don't use them properly. I wonder why that might happen?

Isn't bigotry typically defined as an irrational dislike?

Well, I accidentally kicked off a bit of a storm in this thread. Others have addressed your points in more depth than I care to, and the current leaf comments are wandering close to getting Godwin'd, so it might be time to wind this down.

You haven't explained how you got bigotry out of my comment and I wish you would.

The trouble is, who gets to be the arbiter of the "truth".

Those parents would be telling their children that stuff whether they're home-schooled or not.

Let me make a reductionist argument here:

Do these people teach their children reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic?

If they do, all other defects (as you see them) can be remedied in the future. The simple demonstrable fact that the public schools in the US are often bad if not hopeless (e.g. no phonics) at even those modest goals is enough for me to support even snake handling Pentecostals. Not able to read == no future intellectual life absent, let me put it, a "miracle".

But Common Core testing standards would take care of it, seems like?

What you're describing is "homeschooling" used as code for "no schooling".

Both I and many of my friends were homeschooled. In the circles I was in, most homeschool parents were ambitious and committed to their kid's educations. It is indeed a full job for the parent.

There's more variance in homeschooling, but it can be more effective than either private or public schooling if it's managed effectively. The major benefit is approaching teaching without as much spoon-feeding (better critical thinking/doing skills) and zapping curioisity with pointless memorization.

There are also programs that let a child (depending upon state) do the curriculum from home. K12.com has a partnership with the state of Georgia. You have online learning, participation in standardized testing, etc. all provided free by the state. We have found this to be a viable alternative for one of our daughters who felt she was being held back in her current middle school. Apparently she was. Not only has she made up the "conversion time"...basically redoing the 2 months worth of online work that she missed while she was in her local middle school at the beginning of the year...she has also improved dramatically. The thing I think that I am most excited about is that she is learning how to teach herself. Her study habits, although good previously, are what I would say I had in my third year of college. If you have a child that is extremely motivated this might be an option for your family. It filled a need for us.

There is a tiny (n=12 for unschooled kids) study[1] I saw linked on SSC[2] that apparently shows children educated in "unstructured homeschool" are only one grade behind their peers. So even serious shirking of responsibility doesn't have catastrophic effects.

[1] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232544669_The_impact...

[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-...

I just wanted to respond to point number 1. I was home schooled in third grade and in sixth grade. Both years I would spend no more than three hours a school day learning stuff. Upon enrolling for a private school in the fourth grade I went from being recognized as an average student in the 2nd grade to scoring head and shoulders better than anyone else taking the standardized test going into 4th grade. Needless to say they didn't require me to participate in the end of 5th grade years testing to enroll in the 6th grade.

So, at least in my experience, when you're devoting one on one time with a child, it takes far less time to teach them as you can craft the teaching style to fit their needs.

I've tried to keep an open mind about homeschooling, but every child or adult I've come across that was homeschooled is just, weird...

I'm disappointed the article didn't go over how/if the kids get the much needed social interaction. Kids need conflict, and a lot of it, in order to fit in well with society (and especially the workplace).

I'd love to see a proper study on this, but my experience with almost all of these homeschooled individuals (including myself) is that we are definitely 'weird', but in spite of that, or I suspect because of that, we somehow all do very well in our own unique ways. Many of us are freelancers, consultants, or creative workers, where fitting in is not so important, and being a bit odd is sometimes even celebrated. We often find similarly-weird partners and friends.

Weirdness, in my opinion, is a very good trait, provided you can be 'normal' enough when you have to be. Most homeschooled kids I know spent part of their lives in the normal system, or had extra-curricular activities in more normal social settings, though.

Furthermore, I know many more people who were seriously damaged because of the social interactions in school.

And when you think about it, that kind of makes sense. It seems (relatively) more healthy to me for a kid to spend most of his time with a mix of adults and other kids, often within a strong community-setting, rather than stuck in a classroom with only other kids of their age and an often slightly disinterested teacher (or one going through the motions).

When I hear some people talk about homeschooled kids being "weird", I have to wonder how weird they themselves would seem to others if transported to some other time or place where the local conformists had conformed to a different set of cultural assumptions than those they had conformed to.

What if the local culture had expectations that they found objectionable? I have to wonder whether they would decide to re-conform to whatever happened to be the local fashion in thought and behavior, go along and get along, or whether they would choose a different path and be thought "weird". If they were willing to deviate from unfortunate social norms and risk being different, why not do it here and now?

It matters because I don't take for granted that the current culture in many public schools is the right one to conform to. It would be quite a coincidence if the local culture of the moment just happened to represent the best a human being could be.

That's exactly it. Partly because of homeschooling, I've been instilled with an, I think, rather healthy skepticism to 'normal' things.

Furthermore, being in a public school doesn't just mean conforming to 'local culture', it means conforming to the local culture of those in a small age range. I'd say conformism coupled with being a teen is significantly worse than just having to adapt to 'local culture'.

http://www.ranker.com/list/amazing-people-you-might-not-have...

It's not 'just the tip of the iceberg' as you've described about all of the potential problems.

Social gracelessness is just natural introversion, which is wonderful. The biases of the parents certainly do affect their children, though. In place of lazy teaching I would say that homeschooled children do not gain early experience coping with difficult systems. This is a strength and a weakness depending on where life takes them.

I agree with other commenters that we are nearly living in a golden age of being able to self-direct traditional education as well as educational experiences. It's interesting to compare the current generation of homeschoolers with those 20-30 years ago, when it started to become more popular. At the time, the concern was that a rigorous education could not be obtained in a public school as they were pursuing non-traditional education. Now, public schools are obsessed with academic rigor (to the degree they've embraced Common Core), and the advantage of homeschooling is the flexibility and non-traditional approach.

I think the Common Core standards are supposed to take care of (1) and (2). You have a common set of knowledge against which you're tested, the paths to acquiring that knowledge (public school, private school, parents, hired tutors, YouTube videos) are really up to you.

On (4) there's not hard quantifiable data to suggest homeschooled kids lack social interaction, as amount of quality of social interaction at public school is questionable (and could comprise of bullying another kid). There are home-schooled socialites and public school hermits and weirdos on both ends of the spectrum.

Schooling is only part of social interaction for kids; sport leagues, scout organizations, local clubs can fill that purpose as well.