i agree with a lot of your criticism and cynicism. i could see a good book being written on education with that point of view and level of sarcasm.
having attended the same school, i think the general curriculum is intended to avoid a mass population of idiots. it lacked the overall goal of pushing the kids as far as they can go. i do disagree with your opinion on social skills and homeschooling. no offense to those who where home-schooled but i can confidently say that i cant think of one person that was home-schooled that has productive social skills. they weren't just weird but lacked the ability to use their social skill in the real world to be successful. i can even identify the home-schoolers in my office before they tell me that they did home-school. granted, it might be the fact that most parents that home-school their kids are weird themselves and so instill the lack of social skills in their kids.
i am currently trying to gain a stronger opinion as to whether private school would have been so much better than our high school. i have no doubt it would have been a better curriculum and higher demands for the students but is it really worth paying more than you will for college to have your kids pick up the k-12 concepts? the only solution that i have accepted is that the parents attention, support, and demands of their children make all the difference. so in a school like ours, a good amount of those idiot students were being raised by former idiot students. it's a chain that is usually broken by few unusually mature students that want to break the mold or parents that realize their mistakes and push their kids to take a different path.

on that note i apologize for my run on sentences and lack of grammatical mastery.

Yeah the more I think about it the weirdness of a "homeschooler" would be lessened by the parents ability to demonstrate good social skills. Also effort in encouraging the kids to participate in sports, music, dances, etc. Basically finding a good balance in the amount of shielding from the world.

You also bring up an excellent question, is normal better. Maybe what I perceive as weird socially might make for a better person. Its probably not that easy, or black and white. Plus many of the most successful people in the world are quite unusual. I guess my concerns come from my experiences in graduate school, and now in the professional world. (and i admit i might only notice the home-schooled people because they are weird and it comes up in conversation.) I might just assume my "normal" colleagues are not home-schooled. But I am constantly amazed by some of these guys that are extremely intelligent and knowledgeable but lack the ability to work with others that are different than them. it becomes most problematic with clients. there are seriously two people we avoid giving face time with clients because of their social skills. coincidentally i know that they were home-schooled. granted, i think they would be pretty odd regardless but still. I am painting with a broad brush. again, im sure it is not just the fault of homeschooling.

I would love to hear from some people that were home schooled. To hear if they honestly feel like they can easily socialize with those that arent anything like them. An if so how it was that they got to that point. I would especially like to hear from a type 'A', extroverted, hit of the party type person. (not that this is an ideal type of person, just atypical in my mind).

I dont think the middle class neighborhoods are filled with this vibrant criminal class. Living in atlanta, I read about many schools in "outer city slums" that have horrible crime problems. but the majority of the middle to upper class neighborhoods are good in that sense with occasional isolated incidents. i would assume that idaho couldn't be that bad? how bad can a state with a high percentage of mormon population be?

i hear from my older friends that have kids in private high schools and kids i teach at church that drugs and immorality aren't missing in private schools. there are just more expensive drugs and nicer homes and hallways for immorality to take place. these sort of stories push me towards the home school option. but i also ask myself if i would overly shielding my kids from the world. if they would be better prepared to go off on their own to college having learned to hopefully be good examples to those at a smaller, less intense situation in high school. Because believe it or not college is much worse.. sure you lose a lot of the criminal types but all the other stuff is only more intense.
i would love to hear more about how you view the subject. you seem to have a refreshing viewpoint. its very interesting to hear how negative you felt towards your high school education since we both went to the same school. I never really thought too much about it. apart from knowing a lot of it was a waste of time. but i felt i had the opportunity to advance myself as much as the teenage version of myself could want.
i guess i enjoyed having the opportunity to be a bit of a slacker while i had the chance. especially since now i cant. you know you wouldn't have traded playing soccer for 6 hours a day for being stuck at home with your mom doing schoolwork!!
but seriously i would like to hear more on this. you have me on the fence from our earlier conversations.

Let's outline where we are in the Homeschool vs Public School conversation:

1. Morality

Private School and Public School are both very susceptible to deviant behavior. Public school ranks worse because it socializes you with criminals and low performers. At least Private school socializes you with high performing misfits. Home school ranks first in this area. Please disagree if you don't accept this assumption as undisputed.

2. Socialization

We have discussed several examples of American characters privately tutored (home schooled) that have demonstrated very high levels of social aptitude. We have also acknowledged that even though home schoolers are overwhelmingly weird it doesn't have anything to do with the home school method. I assume we agree that weird home schoolers make weird people. If they went to public school they would be just as weird. We also probably agree that socially dynamic public schoolers would make socially dynamic home schoolers. I will assume that you agree with this point. If this is the case there shouldn't be ANY concern about socialization left in regards to home schooling. Just as a reminder...Elites have never public schooled. They have never NEEDED to socialize with the criminal class. They have NEVER been criticized for being anti social or poorly adapted socially. I will assume that you agree that it isn't that important to socialize with riff raff since the elites have never seen the need to and never have been criticized for bad social skills because of their lack of socialization with that class.

3. Quality Education

We agree that most people are unqualified to teach their own children full time. However, those who are better prepared than public educators ought to feel concern about sending their children off to an inferior option when better options are available at home. Nobody disagrees that home school dominates public schoolers and private schoolers with standardized testing. In some cases they are so superior academically that it is shameful. What is especially revealing is that these results are happening despite the weirdo parents that make up the majority of home schoolers. Let me say that again. Home schoolers are out performing public schoolers. The embarrassing part is that most home school parents are mutants and they still manage to educate kids better than public school. That should be an embarrassing fact that ought to make every public school official cringe.

4. Leisure

Home school when properly administered can be engaging and inspiring. Kids shouldn't be compelled to suffer rote memorization and perfect quietness while they wait for students of inferior intellect to grasp concepts. Instead their natural curiosities should be encouraged and fed. Sometimes a kid will want to play soccer. I think that is fine. Sometimes he will want to learn. Great. I have found that when you give your kid options on the activities they are able to do they tend to balance their life well. My six year old spent an hour today reading to my four year old. They went to the library and did an hour of math. They love it and they do it uncompelled. I loved having tons of leisure time. My problem was that I was still bored even with all my leisure time. I didn't know that boredom resulted in intellectual laziness. People who are extremely curious don't get bored. Curiosity can be taught. I don't believe that it is taught in public school and that is a huge concern. Public schoolers become very uncreative when it comes to leisure because they have no idea of their options and have never been inspired with the excitement of curiosity.

I don't think the problem has much to do with the kids or the teachers, the whole public school structure is a recipe for disaster. You take a bunch of kids, group them by age (rather than emotional intelligence, current knowledge or any other sane criteria), throw them together randomly into groups of 20 or 30. Then take this group and put it in a classroom with an underpaid teacher who is supposed to keep them orderly but has no power to discipline them. You give the teacher a curriculum geared towards one objective - standardize testing, not skills for life, not pursuing the individual interests of the students, not creating a love of learning or teaching kids how to learn on their own, but instead focused on making sure the kids can all perform the same set of basic tasks and regurgitate the same set of memorized facts (learned from state-sponsored textbooks, not first-hand sources), on demand.

If that's not bad enough, you instruct the teacher to be completely politically correct. To teach to the agenda of the state or country, emphasizing less important events in history, culture and even science to make sure the kids get a 'diverse' education regardless of historical or practical significance.

To top it off, you tell the teachers that no child is to be left behind--even if that means that the brightest kids in the class are bored to tears.

It is a system that is so ridiculously and utterly broken that it is a miracle that some kids do come out of it with a semblance of an education and without a complete disgust for learning.

All that without even mentioning the social environment.

Socially kids are placed in an environment that they'll never experience again in their lives. School isn't a meritocracy (like most work places generally are). It's not even like a civic community or neighborhood where you have a little less choice about whom you associate with. You're forced to be around people who you may become friends with and form lifelong relationships, but at the same time if you're unlucky, they are just as likely to judge you based unfairly based on your looks, your race or any other arbitrary factor. It doesn't matter--whatever you get, you're stuck with. It's a job you can't quit, a neighborhood you can't move out of and everyone knows it so no one has to make any effort to accommodate anyone else. You either get lucky or you don't.

One more thing (while I'm at it).

I think that in general, parents of socially adjusted kids send them to public school because they know they'll succeed in public schools (as dismal as success in public schools may actually be) and they feel they have no reason to to consider other options. This means that it's parents who are a little worried about their kids are the ones who start thinking about homeschool as an option because they're already concerned about the social aptitude of their kids.

This results in a majority of homeschoolers being socially maladjusted because that's how they started out--it's the only reason they were homeschooled in the first place. They're mixed in with a minority of homeschooled kids whose parents made the decision to take control of their education out of an intellectually sound desire to give their kids something better.

To me, this highlights something that is broken in American (and maybe world) culture. Homeschooling isn't seen as an option. It's frowned upon both because it's received a bad reputation from the social misfits that are homeschooled and from states (in the geopolitical sense) who want children to receive the education that they sanction, not what parents might see best for their kids--because who knows, that could lead to subversiveness!