[rossnordby]

Putting academics aside, high school is not optimized for socialization.

For many students, it's 5-7 hours a day of explicitly not socializing at all, with brief periods of maybe talking to your friends scattered around, mostly at lunch. Plus homework to stop you from socializing as much as you might like after school.

What socialization students do get from school tends to be extremely filtered by age and other factors like academic track. The median student isn't interacting with a diverse range of people- they're almost all within 1 year of age and often share the majority of their background. When you stack compulsory attendance and restrictions on top, it becomes an extremely warped microcosm that can easily breed horrible behavior. Unfortunately, when it gets bad, schools rarely have the ability to deal with it, and students have exceedingly little autonomy. For most students going through that, the 'lessons' learned will rarely carry over because adults simply aren't operating under the same rules or context, and one does not need practice in suffering.

This isn't the system you'd build if your goal was to spit out a well-socialized human.

It'd be far better to set aside a good chunk of hours a week for intentional socialization, preferably across a wide range of activities. Playing with your friends, helping tutor younger kids, apprenticing with adults in meaningful work, trying to work on self-driven projects with peers... all of these are hugely better socialization opportunities than what high school is for US students.