"It isn't an issue of being anti-social, it is an issue of being exposed to a vast and diverse set of different people with different biases, backgrounds, and abilities."
School is a homogenization factory, by design. I'd be more confident in homeschoolers meeting people with different "biases, backgrounds, and abilities" than in traditional school.
It's worth remembering that schools are an incredibly artificial construct that are barely a hundred years old, and school as we know it is younger than that. It's cognitively tempting, but wrong to treat schooling as the obviously-correct "default answer" against which everything else must strive to be measured... in reality, it's a fairly new idea with at best a mixed track record, and if viewed with historically-informed perspective, one with a lot of serious problems, not least of which is the observed fact of systematic squashing of intellectual curiousity.
And remember, when observed fact and theory clash, observed fact wins. It doesn't matter that theoretically school shouldn't do that. It does.
(In fact, to the list of school's crimes personally I'd add that it has created an entire society trained to trust academic theories over observed fact. But that's another discussion.)
Further, there are plenty of people who come out of school exceedingly poorly "socialized", which can also often be traced back to the artificial social conditions of school itself, combined with the cohort system's effect of requiring each new class of kindergarteners being required to construct a new social system from scratch, which is, of course, inevitably a very childish and immature one compared to one in which younger children are folded into a richer social structure formed by children of many ages. I reject the idea that schooling as we know it produces "perfectly socialized" children. It produces school-socialized children, which isn't the same thing. It's a great deal of the reason why we seem to be infantalized at an older and older age and this failed "socialization" is one of the major reasons I believe the current school system needs to be fully replaced... the "socialization" the current system produces is not a triumph but one of its major glaring flaws.
School is a homogenization factory, by design. I'd be more confident in homeschoolers meeting people with different "biases, backgrounds, and abilities" than in traditional school.
It's worth remembering that schools are an incredibly artificial construct that are barely a hundred years old, and school as we know it is younger than that. It's cognitively tempting, but wrong to treat schooling as the obviously-correct "default answer" against which everything else must strive to be measured... in reality, it's a fairly new idea with at best a mixed track record, and if viewed with historically-informed perspective, one with a lot of serious problems, not least of which is the observed fact of systematic squashing of intellectual curiousity.
And remember, when observed fact and theory clash, observed fact wins. It doesn't matter that theoretically school shouldn't do that. It does.
(In fact, to the list of school's crimes personally I'd add that it has created an entire society trained to trust academic theories over observed fact. But that's another discussion.)
Further, there are plenty of people who come out of school exceedingly poorly "socialized", which can also often be traced back to the artificial social conditions of school itself, combined with the cohort system's effect of requiring each new class of kindergarteners being required to construct a new social system from scratch, which is, of course, inevitably a very childish and immature one compared to one in which younger children are folded into a richer social structure formed by children of many ages. I reject the idea that schooling as we know it produces "perfectly socialized" children. It produces school-socialized children, which isn't the same thing. It's a great deal of the reason why we seem to be infantalized at an older and older age and this failed "socialization" is one of the major reasons I believe the current school system needs to be fully replaced... the "socialization" the current system produces is not a triumph but one of its major glaring flaws.