[ultrarunner]

Also anecdotal, but I suspect that the religiously motivated homeschoolers were already going to suffer socially, homeschooled or not. The only way that government schools would have altered the outcome was by providing peers to challenge their (often poorly-supported) religious positions. Assuming the methodology bordered on bullying, I'm not sure that would necessarily lead to an outcome of better socialization. I could certainly be wrong, though.

[burfog]

An interesting example is the Westboro Baptist children. They are sent to public school in order to learn about how rotten the sinners are. The bullying they receive helps to drive home that lesson.

[EdwardDiego]

In my experience (from moving in religious homeschooling circles) it's more that they're doing it to "save" their children from the "world" - so having them at home is them already doing the best by their children, so having accomplished that, they're less worried about ensuring regular socialisation.

And as they often have large families, their children have a large number of sibiling so aren't lonely, so they presume it's all good. Which just leads to entire families of socially inept homeschoolers.

Whether or not religious people retain their views is not the benefit of socialisation - being able to function in everyday human society through direct experience of it, not a carefully curated and managed microscopic subset, that's the advantage.

[ultrarunner]

I agree with almost all of what you're saying. I'm not suggesting that a social experience outside of the purview of the insular groups this small subset of religious folks experience is not beneficial. What I'm suggesting is that the particular experience offered by public schools (especially in rural and semi-rural areas insular religious homeschoolers typically inhabit) is not particularly beneficial for the socialization of (otherwise) religious homeschoolers.

I don't know of any studies (or if any could be performed, really) that demonstrate the social impact of public schools on students like this, or at least easily-identified outgroup kids. I know from anecdotal experience that in the public schools I attended that they (the semi-cultish religious kids who were not/no longer homeschooled) were not treated well, never successfully integrated socially, and disappeared from my radar very quickly after graduation. With hindsight I feel very badly about that now, and wish there some way to impact the systemic cliquish nature of public schools, especially high school. Unfortunately I lack a time machine for the kids of the past, and simply don't have answers for those going forward.

Either way, my suspicion is that public schools specifically do not offer the best (or even a much better) experience for socializing students.