[jtcruthers]

I've never heard of that before. Many homeschooled kids I knew were very smart, but definitely lacked social skills. I've never heard of them having FAR worse educations, especially compared to bad public schools. "Really poor public schools" are an incredibly low bar.

Socialization is a hard problem to fix. I know they try with after school sports/activities/clubs, but that's not quite the same as being around peers for 8+ hours a day. In non-homeschool, the children are around other children more than adults/parents.

[shantly]

My experience was that what passes for "socialization" in k-12 school is extremely weird compared to the same among adults. I wouldn't rule out that it is nonetheless somehow important to kids' development in a way other approaches aren't, but my gut feeling is that socialization among adults and a range of peer students of many different ages rather than mostly the same age +/- one year (how the hell, exactly, is one supposed to model the behavior of socially-successful older kids when one is rarely around them, or easily notice one's own failings when not exposed to amplified versions of the same in younger kids?) would be far better at turning out well-adjusted people.

[cldellow]

It might vary by location. I grew up in rural British Columbia and homeschooled for a year due to a family feud with the local grade six teacher.

The other homeschooled kids I interacted with were homeschooled for religious reasons or so they could help on the farm. They were poorly socialized and poorly educated as best as my then eleven year old self could tell.

[livueta]

Yeah, +1 anecdata.

I was homeschooled for a while and saw a lot of the other homeschooling families via the school district resource center thing, which even the real extremists interacted with at least some. From my perspective, it was broken into three major groups: religious conservatives concerned with the moral purity of their kids, upper-middle class professionals interested in accelerating their kids as much as possible, and a grab bag of students from various socioeconomic stripes who'd had trouble with the standard school system for various reasons.

I was one of the second. My mom has advanced degrees in education. My dad's an attorney. I did fine, as did basically everybody else in that cohort. Even then, the impression my friends and I had was that the religious kids spent an awful lot of time on literal bible study and weren't so hot on "actual" education. These suspicions were borne out when it was time for the state standardized tests they wanted homeschooled kids to take - every kid from the second of those cohorts (and many from the third) blasted though them, while those from the first visibly struggled. The religiously-motivated cohort also managed to out-weird a bunch of kids who spent much of their time on mid-2000s 4chan as young teens, which is actually pretty impressive.

Anyway, I agree that the reason a student is homeschooled (and by proxy the resources and pedagogical methods available to them) is a much better predictor of overall outcomes than a simple homeschooled/not binary. When there's such significant clustering in a category, trying to make judgments only utilizing knowledge/stereotypes regarding the category as a whole is a good way to be misled.