>As someone else pointed out, it's not clear that school helps with [learning how to be likeable]
The rebuttal to your point is so simple and obvious it's really hard to take you seriously. Socializing is a skill that can be practiced. If you have fewer opportunities to practice, you're less likely to get better. The children that are bad at socializing despite going to public school do not show that public school doesn't teach socializing, it means they didn't learn as much from their practice. For all you know, poorly-socialized public school children would have otherwise ended up living in their parents' basements until 45 or turned into serial killers if they were homeschooled. Public schooling doesn't need to guarantee good outcomes to be the more desirable choice.
The hard lesson I learned is that success in socializing as an adult is quite different from success in socializing in school. I don't make close friends with adults the way I did as a school kid. I had to unlearn a lot of my school life to succeed.
The school environment is a very artificial one, and not very comparable with much in the adult world. Those who stick to the rules learned there tend not to do well (also found out the hard way). For years I've tossed the idea in my head to write a blog post of all the life lessons one learns in school that lead to poor performance at work. Likewise, I'd like to write another post on all the lessons from school that often do translate to the work environment (because it was so ingrained in us), but which leads to suboptimal working conditions.
I can't obviously discount your experience, and my school experience was actually quite good - but just as you are aware of the downsides of home schooling, I'm aware of the downsides of schools.
If we go beyond anecdotes and to research, I believe most research is in favor of home schooling - both academically and socially.
There is no arguing with you people. The sort of things you miss out on if you're homeschooled are totally unimaginable to you so there isn't anything I can say that will change your stance unless you literally live through the experience. It has nothing to do with only comparing yourself to the median or upper quintile of public school socializers. The only way that position would seem reasonable to you is if you never met any homeschoolers or only talked to the parents, who obviously will be extremely hesitant to admit to mistakes because it makes them look bad.
There's also a huge and obvious problem with studying homeschooling. Part of the disadvantage is that each homeschool environment will be radically different because it's impossible to control for what a given home life is, the type of parent that would homeschool their child, and the sort of education they otherwise would have had if they weren't homeschooled. It's also really easy to track down all the homeschoolers that ended up going to college because that data is already gathered. It's a lot harder to track down all the homeschoolers that never left their parents basement or work the night shift at the 7/11 because they barely learned how to read, so you really can't say that "statistically" it's better or worse. Of course the data will be skewed so homeschoolers seem like higher performers.
I'll just add: It's a common mistake to compare yourself against people who are in the upper quintiles of the "other" category. When you compare your social skills with others, are you including the full spectrum of folks who go to school - including dropouts, etc?
The rebuttal to your point is so simple and obvious it's really hard to take you seriously. Socializing is a skill that can be practiced. If you have fewer opportunities to practice, you're less likely to get better. The children that are bad at socializing despite going to public school do not show that public school doesn't teach socializing, it means they didn't learn as much from their practice. For all you know, poorly-socialized public school children would have otherwise ended up living in their parents' basements until 45 or turned into serial killers if they were homeschooled. Public schooling doesn't need to guarantee good outcomes to be the more desirable choice.