I was home schooled, and I did find it hard to mix with people my own age (hence games replacing my friends lol) But now am completely fine, and feel like I have turned out to be a better person because of it!

The vast majority of homeschoolers are involved in a co-op. I've never actually met anyone that wasn't. I'm not saying it can't happen, but when 5-10% of the population homeschools, there is a large group of people within a 20 mile radius that can network and work together for home education.

that's very enlightening, thank you.

Home schooling is fine if they learn the things they have too. Not sure why people think they won't have friends, call me crazy but my best friend lives like 100 yards away, school had nothing to do with meeting him either lol.

i have a another friend who is getting married to a girl who was sent to a private school by some radical christian religious cult or something, her highschool "diploma" is worthless because of it. these are the things that fail kids

It's not about friends, it's about social situation.

It's about competition, seeing others fail, getting in trouble in front of the whole class, social mistakes, wearing the wrong clothes that one day, seeing girls or boys you might like, striving to impress others, and learning all the little intricacies in between.

If the homeschooling is co-op, then it's basically the same. But by ones self, it's not.

Homeschooling rocks.  It can cost just about nothing to do.  However, the government spends about $17,000 per year per student where I live.  Just think, if everyone home schooled it would drop my property taxes by over 50% and my state taxes too.  Or course, that isn't going it happen.

Besides homeschooling only costing a tiny fraction as much as government school, the students usually did better on standardized tests and from what I have noticed, are much better behaved and generally better people.  Oh yeah, and there is the thing about a lot of government schools providing absolutely terrible educations that are either very dangerous or not at all tailored to special needs students. 

Oh, and around 1/3 of the time at government schools can just be a complete waste of time.  I remember having to spend an hour a day on the bus just going to school and back.

Parents that homeschool are heros.  They help their children, they help their community and they help the world.  Anyone against homeschool is seriously uneducated on the subject or is just in it because they want the government to be as big as possible and taxes to be as high as possible.

I was bullied in school yet I still would not have wanted to be home schooled. Sure there are bad memories, but also many great ones.
I mainly want my kids to go to school to get as many different perspectives on things as possible. I had about 15 different teachers a year in high school and different kids in different classes, all with their own questions and opinions.

At least where I live, you can homeschool and still send your kids to government school for whatever classes you want them to take there.  You can have it all.

So you have pre-emptively dismissed any opinion that isn't the same as yours as uneducated?

On topic: I believe that there is much more to school than education, it's where you learn about the world. I think that the schooling system has a lot to offer that homeschooling does not. In some situations I can see why home schooling would be the better option, but I think for the majority of kids going to a normal school is a better idea.

I'm personally not convinced that the test score comparisons between homeschooled kinds and children in the public education system is really an apples-to-apples comparison; after all, the act of homeschooling your children demonstrates a greater involvement in your child's education than the average parent of a child in the public education system.

With that said, even though I graduated from one of the best public education systems in the world I'm not convinced that public education is scratching the surface of the average child's potential. From what I have seen the public education system is set up so that 75% or 80% of students will be able to obtain satisfactory grades with almost no effort from the student, teacher or the student's parents; and the bottom 20% to 25% are allowed to "fail" because no one is willing to put in the effort to evaluate these children for learning disabilities, question the effectiveness of the curriculum or the teacher, or try to motivate these children to obtain more. While I could be wrong but I suspect, if you were able to make enough changes to have children being educated at close to their potential, most children could become competent at a grade 12 level in most subjects by the time they graduated grade 8 or 9.