I remember school as a massive waste of time, but it definitely helped me develop social skills.
That said, I'm really not seeing this effect with my kids in the SF Bay Area. They have few opportunities to socialize on school grounds, and are then whisked away by parents and taken to after-school classes or back home to sit in front of a computer. "Socialization" boils down to kids hanging around on social networks on their phones. And even these seem to be shifting from chat to passive consumption (TikTok, etc).
“Socializing” children in schools is an oxymoron. School is where children are prevented from becoming socialized by being placed into an age-segregated situation with only one authority figure present. It’s only a slight improvement on Lord of the Flies.
This doesn't make a lot of sense: classrooms are full of other children, who socialize with each other. Classrooms empty into lunchrooms and schoolyards, which are not segregated by year.
> Classrooms empty into lunchrooms and schoolyards, which are not segregated by year.
In my experience, in elementary school our class had assigned tables for lunch and a specific time when we had the playground and blacktop. YMMV. But at any rate a half hour in the cafeteria and a half hour in the yard aren't the best places a child could learn to interact with other children; the characteristics of these activities are constrained by the form of the institution.
My schools (all of them) had open seating and free-for-alls in their open areas; at my high school, they didn’t even bother trying to keep us inside the grounds (which meant that we could, and did, go socialize with the neighborhood.) This is in a school system that contains roughly a million students, and (AFAIK) didn’t impose significant differences between individual schools.
I can’t imagine assigned seating working very well, except for at a very small school in a small district. Yours might not be a representative case.
Any decent-sized town or city will have homeschooling groups that organize regular activities to address that issue. Often parents will also form small homeschooling groups or pods that provide socialization opportunities during "class". Plus there are classic extracurriculars like sports teams, music, etc. Social media has also helped a lot with organizing and coordinating these sorts of groups.
