That happens in any social setting, and I do not think school is even a good one. Many schools in the UK limit socialisation and tell students "you are here to learn, not socialise".

People learned to social skills at least as well before going to school become normal, in my experience home educated kids are better socialised, etc.

Phew, gonna do a heavy disagree on that one. There is very little better for learning how to navigate and survive the brutality of human nature than school. Home schooled students almost always are not well equipped to deal with conflict or consensus building, in my experience.

But being home schooled can also mean that the kids learn to operate in the adult world, as children, but with expectations of others as adults and an implied sense that they also should strive to meet the bar of mature adult behavior.

This happens when children exist in the world side by side with their parents, who have chosen to live a life (for the time being) that will provide a rich environment in which their children can mature.

We didn’t have the resources to provide a high quality private education, so we uprooted, sold our stuff, packed up a cargo trailer and a van, and spent a decade getting by on a shoestring while doing the most interesting and challenging things we imagined we might achieve as a family.

For the formative years of my children, that is what we did.

From an early age, aside from their siblings, they interacted primarily with adults in their world, often from different cultures and speaking different languages, and often in situations where the stakes were high (intrinsic danger imposed by the natural environment and classical physics) .

They learned to be a cohesive team, to handle responsibility within the range of their understanding, to seek and accept council, and to ignore immature behavior when it pops up in inappropriate times.

This sometimes rugged beginning has served them quite well in their lives. I could never have provided them with the social foundations that they have today in a public school environment, and we didn’t have the money for a high-caliber private education.

My kids interacted a lot with adults but they also interacted with a lot of kids too - including school going kids.

Camping with 3 kids wasn’t bad, really, a lot of work but a lot of teaching opportunities.

When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner. We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it. We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol. The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard) Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure.

We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat it, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats.

It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the bloat important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to bee overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits.

I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education.

It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed.

The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat.

You imply that traditional schooling teaches this, but in my experience plenty of people never learn either skill and perhaps work is where we learn it.

I've just been a fly-on-the-wall seeing 3x 20s women trying to resolve a significant conflict - they all seemed to have a horrific struggle because 2 of them were extreme conflict avoiders.

I see the same issue in some 50s to 70s friends: an inability to deal with facts or conflicts leading to poor outcomes for themselves.

Do most home schooled children lack intuititively learned social skills? Alternatively, some friends with great social skills had lots of siblings (I think that helps too).

Conflict isn’t an issue for me at all, and consensus-building is probably one of my strengths.

I said all this to say, anecdotal opinions are just that, anecdotal, and opinions.

The whole “homeschooled kids are weird” is a narrative that seems to have been politically driven, not based in reality.

There is a higher proportion of kids with mental health issues and special needs because of a lack of provision in schools. More social liberal than the population at large and more affluent. Maybe more of some religious groups.

I learned that people don't think the way I do, that my peers can include sadists, that adults can make mistakes or be arses and you can be powerless to change their minds.

Which was valuable, but it wasn't telling me anything about "the system" being flawed (unless you count the fact it was a Catholic school and that I stopped being Christian while in that school as a result of reading the Bible), which I had to figure out gradually in adulthood.

I don't know what the rules are in the UK (or what they were at the time), but we did get school inspectors visiting from time to time.

I only thought to mention this at all because if you say "public school" in the UK you mean a school you have to pay a fee for, to contrast with "private tuition" (amongst other historical baggage): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)

No, it was terrible, that's why I decided it was my enemy. And golly I think we knocked it down a peg or two by the time I was done there. But a few brilliant teachers managed to convince me not to hate the players, just the game.

I am glad I did not attend your school. That lesson is far, far from universal.

Every time I think I have a real enemy among the people I interact with personally, I eventually come to understand that their problematic behavior is--if not justified--explainable. And once I have that explanation, it never seems like acting against them directly is likely to have any positive effect. If they're playing a role in which we're opposed, the solution is to find a way to rewrite the script such that we're not.

That doesn't mean it's all sunshine and rainbows, conflict still happens, but I try not to let it be the kind of conflict that has been designed by some authority to keep me and my "enemy" busy such that we're too distracted with each other to reconsider the legitimacy of that authority--and I think that counts for quite a lot of conflict in the world, which is why I wish more people had come to this conclusion.

I think the best place for learning this is a school, where the attempt to make you compete with your peers over "points," whatever those are, is so laughably transparent in its lack of regard for your wellbeing, and where the consequences of failing are so low. Meanwhile, quite a lot of fun and learning can happen because you're all stuck there anyway, might as well make the most of it.

One must eventually confront authority somewhere, where else?

I’ve always favored we teach more on character, people skills (esp body language or motivations), critical thinking, statistics, personal finance, etc. early on. Whatever we see playing out in a big way, esp skills crucial for personal advancement and democracy, should take place over maximizing the number of facts or rules memorized.

Also, one might wonder why a school system would be designed to maximize compliance to authority figure’s seemingly meaningless rules and facts. If anything, it would produce people who were mediocre, but obedient, in authoritarian structures. Looking at the history of education, we find that might not be far from the truth.

I think the explanation is a little more mundane—it’s just an easier way to teach. Compliance becomes more and more valuable as classroom sizes increase—you can have a more extreme student-teacher ratio if your students are more compliant. Meaningless rules and facts provide benchmarks so teachers can easily prove to parents and administrators that students are meeting those benchmarks. People value accountability more than excellence… something that applies broadly in the corporate world as well.

Somehow, despite this, we keep producing a steady stream of people with decent critical thinking skills, creativity, curiosity, and even rebellion. They aren’t served well by school but these people keep coming out of our school system nonetheless. Maybe it can be explained by some combination of instinctual defiance against authority figures and some individualistic cultural values; I’m not sure.

It could be true. They sold it to us as a way to teach them. If it’s not teaching them, then they would be wasting the money of taxpayers to do something different. If parents wanted what you describe, or just a babysitter / teacher, then they might still support it. We need honesty, though, so parents can make tradeoffs among various systems.

Also, the capitalists that originally funding and benefited from the public model also send their own kids to schools with different models. Those models consistently work better to produce future professionals, executives, and leaders.

So, the question is: “Do none of the components of those private schools scale in a public model? Or do they have different goals for students of public schools and students of elite schools like their own kids?” Maybe we’re overly paranoid, though.

Re good outcomes

Well, there’s maybe two things going on. Made in God’s image, we’re imbued with free will, emotional motivations, the ability to learn, to adapt, to dream. Even in the hood, some kids I went to school with pushed themselves to do great things. If public school is decent or good, then our own nature will produce some amount of capable people.

The real question is what percentage of people acquire fundamental abilities we want. Also, what percentage is successful? A worrying trend is how most teachers I know are pulling their hair out about how students can’t read, do math, anything. Examples from both people I know in real life and teachers I see online:

“Young people in our college classes are currently reading at a sixth grade level. They don’t understand the materials. I have to re-write or explain them so they can follow along.”

“I get my college students to do a phonics program. It doesn’t get them to a college level. It does usually increase their ability by a year or two level.” (Many seconded that online comment.)

“I hate to say it but they’re just dumb now. If they learn anything, I feel like I accomplished something.”

“My goal is to get them to focus on even one lesson for a few minutes and tell me even one word or character in the lesson. If they do that, we’re making progress.”

Whatever system (and culture) that is doing this on a large scale is not educating people. Our professors should never have to give people Hooked on Phonics on college to get them past sixth grade level. This is so disasterous that ditching it for something else entirely or trying all kinds of local experiments makes a lot of sense.

Re: “different models”—the main difference with private schools is that private schools are permitted to eject students for whatever reason they want. They can solve classroom management problems by removing problematic students from the school entirely. It would be morally wrong to let public schools do the same thing.

IMO this is difference is the only difference worth talking about between public and private schools. Other factors exist but this difference is just too big and swamps the others. Public schools which are permitted to be more selective show much better outcomes, such as Stuyvesant. Wikipedia has a dedicated page listing Stuyvesant alumni, including several Nobel prize winners, the Fields medal, musicians, actors, and politicians. It’s part of the NYC public school system.

> Whatever system (and culture) that is doing this on a large scale is not educating people.

I don’t think I can evaluate this statement—I don’t know what you actually mean by that. Surely you don’t mean it in a literal sense, but I don’t have any kind of landmark for what kind of figurative sense you mean here.

> This is so disasterous that ditching it for something else entirely or trying all kinds of local experiments makes a lot of sense.

I don’t think you’ve made a compelling argument here, or even touched on some kind of framework for evaluating the problem. There are so many contributing factors for why public schools are often terrible—underpaid teachers, underfunded programs, standardized tests, constant meddling from politicians and administrators, etc. Some things about public schools you have to accept as part of the constraints, or you have to come up with some kind of radical, outside of the box thinking for how to get around them. For example, the idea that you send kids, from morning to afternoon, to a local school where they sit in a room with 25 peers from their local neighborhood and receive instruction on some particular topic.

“Ditching it for something else entirely” is a suggestion that can be dismissed unless you can come up with some argument that “something else entirely” plausibly exists.

I think the sad truth is that we know how to improve public schools, but it takes a lot of slow work and political power. Coming up with new ideas doesn’t help us if we are already failing to implement ideas which we know work.

I assume you have at least heard about or may even have read “Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre” by Keith Johnstone. If not, I think you would find it interesting.

It teaches students how to function in an unnatural, dysfunctional, often toxic environment and as adults many have to spend years unlearning the bad habits they picked up. It also takes many years to learn as adults they shouldn't put up with the kind of bad treatment from bosses and peers that they had no way to distance themselves from in school.

I'm not sure these lessons are what society should be teaching kids.

Many adults, for instance, do end up receiving bad treatment throughout their lives. Not everyone is able to find jobs without that, for instance. Is that simply their fault for not trying hard enough, or learning a bad lesson that they should put up with it, or is it simply easier said than done?

Because the human body develops into maturity over ~18 years. It probably doesn't really take that long to teach people to cooperate, but if we pulled children from a social learning environment earlier they might overwrite that societal training with something they learn afterward.

Someone with domain expertise can expand on my ELI5 version below:

The parts of the brain that handle socially appropriate behavior aren't fully baked until around the early twenties.

Anecdotally socially inappropriate teen behaviour seems to be part of a subconscious learning process. But maybe pushing boundaries matters at all ages?