Quote: That said, the ones I am familiar with have not really learned how to negotiate with their peers for whatever reason. Perhaps not enough time away from mom/dad so they don't learn to stand on their own? I dunno, but that is my observation.
My experience has not been the same. Homeschooled children are going to have the same range of social characteristics as do publically schooled children. I don't know exactly what is entailed in negotiating with peers, so I don't know how to respond to that.
Here are some of my thoughts on the socialization issue.
At no other time of a human's life are they going to be spending 8 hours a day with a group of ~30 people who are all within a 12-month range of the same age.
Unless kids are living a hermetical existance where they aren't involved in church, neighborhood, community, sports, etc. activities, then they are interacting/socializing with other humans albeit on a much reduced scale.
Just how much time do kids get to "socialize" during school hours anyway? On the bus trip to school, 5-10 minutes before the school bell rings, less than half an hour during lunch, many schools don't even have a play period for younger kids anymore, 5-10 minutes after school, and finally on the bus trip home. Socializing during class hours is not only not allowed, it is rigorously discouraged. So, it looks like maybe about an hour per day?
If your primary peer group are all your age, then I see it as soaking in a pool of collective ignorance.
I think it more important to rear a child to be strong within themselves, to have the opportunity to develop their own personality as much as possible, before subjecting them to the cruelty that is part and parcel of the primary school experience, much less the middle school level. I am writing this from a position of being one of the most popular kids in my school, so it's not a case of sour grapes. That I knew how to play the game well doesn't mean that I liked the game or wanted my child to have to sink into it.
I was not willing to play russian roulette with the quality of socialization my child might get, nor to focus on that as a primary need. Public schooling, even in the primary grades is bog-awful for smart kids. Boredom, enforced silence, mandatory sitting for hours, kindegarten homework, school mandated ritalin, the inability to pursue your curiosity for more than a short period of time if at all, the interminable busy work, the ongoing public embarrassment for the kids who don't get it as quickly, the push to acquiece to authority that may or may not be worthy.
For all the whacked out homeschooled kids (and I know they're out there) I can only point out that they are the result of whacked out parents (who did go through the institutional school systems). So which came first, the whacked out parent or the whacked out kid?
For those homeschooled kids who can't deal with a peer group, my guess is that they would have similar problems no matter what their schooling background might have been. If socialization (and is there a qualifier of good and bad here?) is performed so well primarily in schools, then they have something to answer for in relationship to the group dynamics that are an integral part of the schooling situation because the disfunctional kids shouldn't exist since they've been properly socialized.
Schools are geared for one type of learner - auditory learners. Those kids who can retain much of what they hear in class. Many kids learn better visually (they retain what they read) and many are kinesthetic learners (they retain what they do). Kids with different learning styles aren't accommodated in a group schooling situation.
Schools can't accommodate for the slightly delayed learner - children learn to walk from vastly differing ages. We don't flunk the kids who can't walk at 12 months, but we do flunk kids who aren't at a specific educational place at a specific grading time in a few specific subjects.
The reality is that there are a high percentage of people who couldn't wait to get out of school and who carry the psychological scars of the socialization they incurred.
