JohnnyEnglish
"My DC are at school and some of the key benefits I think would be harder (not necessarily impossible) to recreate at home are:
- A broad range of interactions with different adults and children which teaches negotiation, compromise, social skills, how to deal with perspectives different to theirs etc.
- Team work
- Competition
- Independence"
IME all of those skills tend to be easier to acquire OUTSIDE the school system than within it. In principle, schools could work successfully on instilling them. But in practice, they are not high priorities and get pushed out in favour of other aims.
Just to discuss the first of your four points, I doubt most teachers have time to allow negotiation and compromise to happen in the classroom as they might do in more relaxed informal settings. Teachers' agenda is to get the children settled and learning the curriculum with a minimum of disruption and delay, not to assist several of them to thoroughly resolve their dispute about who gets to sit in the favourite chair or wait 20 minutes while they sort it out for themselves.
At school, kids don't typically interact much with children who are younger or older, interactions which I think are tremendously valuable. The adults with whom they come into contact are usually there not to socialise with them or do business with them but to teach them, meaning there is quite a power imbalance and they don't practice a range of social skills.
It's useful for kids (especially through their teens) to feel that in some situations adults are their peers. This is how they learn to participate in adult society. At the evening chess club I go to, sometimes I teach children. But other children who are stronger players than I are kind enough to give ME advice on my game, which they learn to do in a supportive and tactful way. My teenager used to teach martial arts to adults, and worked in part-time jobs alongside adults.
My 15yo had a valuable experience at a ladies' choir, working to reform the dress code. All singers were required to wear heels unless they had a doctors' note exempting them. My teen pointed out that requiring a doctors' note was demeaning to the (usually elderly) people who felt unsteady on their feet climbing up and down the risers and that the policy prioritised traditional appearance over their health and safety. Some of these singers had complained in private about the dress code but hadn't felt able to challenge it. It was a prolonged negotiation requiring considerable diplomacy, persistence and assertiveness. This sort of transition into adult life is hard to replicate in schools, where the creation and enforcement of rules is the exclusive preserve of adults, while kids must simply obey.
Developing a good range of real-world skills is easier to do out IN the wider world than in a school which necessarily limits kids' exposure to all these real-world experiences.
So I agree with you about the importance of those skills, but I reach the opposite conclusion: they are a benefit of home education rather than of school.