Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

I can attest to this exact same scenario with my children and their schools. I observed both types: the parents who immediately entered the school combative towards administration (not looking to collaborate on a solution, just shouting loudly to "fix it"), and parents who spent time engaging with administration towards a description of the problem and ideas for resolving them.

That being said, there are and were definitely limits to what public schools can do. They are resource strapped, procedurally constrained, often fighting their own political bureaucratic battles within the school districts, and even within the academic departments.

We ended up leaving the public school for those reasons, and could not be happier.

My observation was: public schools have become much like enterprises, and private schools tend to be more like startups. The public school has so much inertia and tends to have "guardrails" and policies to keep even bad administrations functioning, but at the cost of exceptionalism and performance. Private schools have less of this, and more direct accountability.

You absolutely can have a private school that doesn't educate better than a public school, but I'd argue at least one of two things happen: 1) the school fails to attract student, and closes.. or 2) the school focus shifts away from education to other priorities (e.g., social status, culture, or sports), relegating academics to a secondary role.

>"Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.

> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."

Context is /everything/.

Dealing with "average" people as an adult means dealing with them under the boundaries, strictures, customs, and etiquette of adults in your society enforced, in some sense at least, by laws, and with people are are, at least in theory, bound to serve and protect who will come to your aid when those boundaries are broken.

Dealing with "average" people (really just the lowest quintile cause all the problems) for me in school resulted in multiple fractures, trips for stitches, and ultimately /my expulsion/ from one school district because I had the gall to hit back rather than just let some kid beat me to death while a teacher watched and did nothing.

I've been accused of all manner of things in other comment threads for my ardent desire to protect my children from what you think of as "average", and I'll happily take your words and savor them because it means my children will never be beaten, robbed, see a dead body at a bus stop on their way home for school, or any of the other horrible shit that happened to me because I had to be surrounded by the "average".

The entire point of my own economic mobility and gaining wealth was to create a better future for my children, and that /very much/ includes their education. You can take your exposure to the "average" a.k.a. unnecessary torture and shove it.

> in a safe environment with minimal consequences and some guard rails

The problem is that a public school, at least in the US, is /not/ a safe environment with minimal consequences, and it has effectively no guard rails. Your idea is a nice one, but it's not realistic, and reality is exactly why people are opting out of public schooling for their children.

"Adult-level social skills" for children was historically normal, and it's only in the past century that children are assumed to be incapable of speaking plainly and intelligently to adults, or vice versa.

You might want to do some looking into the "invention of childhood"; what we understand as "children, teenagers, young adults, adults" is a fairly modern way to look at "stages of development". In the distant past, children participated far more comfortably and fluently in adult society than they do today, when they're sequestered away.

It is very difficult to see any representations of this in the US, where most children are in school, so I'll point to examples in fiction: fictional novels or movies where the protagonist is taken confidently through an unfamiliar city by a child who seems to know every location, has a sleeping place, weapons, a method of finding money, and a network of friends. In these works of fiction, the child is almost always a semi-homeless "urchin"; but this is mostly because modern writers can't conceive of a child that capable without also assuming that the child's parents must not be involved in their life, because modern people equate "parenting and raising children" with "making sure children only ever do child-appropriate things".

My question to you: what do you think it would look like if two loving, attentive parents tried to raise a kid with the confidence and skills of those fictional street children, but also actually fed them and gave them a place to live?

It is very likely that the answer to that question is far closer to the way that children used to behave and live than the way that children are today.

I also recommend looking at old tests and study material (pre-1900, ideally pre-1800) for young children. Children can read, figure, write, and remember at a level far superior than they're assumed to be able to today, and that goes for adult socialization as well.

Neither should be controversial.