[sfink]

My kids did very well in school academically, and weren't particularly bullied (which is not to say that it didn't happen at all, just that it wasn't a big part of their experiences.) They were both fairly popular amongst both students and teachers (for somewhat different reasons), and we loved most things about the school philosophy and staff.

We still pulled them out and are now homeschooling them, largely because of the "socialization" at the traditional school. My oldest in particular was retreating behind a social facade, and his innate interest in just about everything was dwindling, choked off by the social pressures of both his classmates and the sick game of "achievement" that schools present.

I'm not going to say that everything is perfect or even that everything is better. We're a family of introverts, and we all struggle with socialization, but for him the social situations that we seek out are doing far more for him than the forced interactions of traditional school.

And you really have a huge amount of control and opportunities for socialization when you're homeschooling. There are get-togethers with other homeschoolers. There are in-person classes. There are things that would traditionally be called "extracurricular" but we see as core parts of what a childhood should involve. Some people form microschools, or have parents teach rotating topics. The online stuff isn't disconnected from other humans, and as the author of this piece says, it's not the "let's transplant our usual methods on top of Zoom!" bullshit that so many people have suffered with.

There certainly are tradeoffs and tension. If you want self-paced, it's hard to stick with a known cohort of other kids. It requires quite a bit of privilege to have the time and opportunity to shepherd this stuff through. I am greatly indebted to my wife for setting things up and managing them. There's no way it would happen if we were both still working full-time. And it won't work as well for some people—it's not the same for every kid or every family.

That's kind of the whole point.