That still causes issues. Co-ops are still extremely insular. It isn't an issue of being anti-social, it is an issue of being exposed to a vast and diverse set of different people with different biases, backgrounds, and abilities.
Home-schooled kids aren't permanently crippled and unable to succeed or something, but the range of people they are able to relate to and understand is diminished I think.
Non-academic groups are definitely good, but many of those often involve a great deal of like-mindedness (such as church groups, or groups sponsored by church groups). I don't expect you or other people who were home-schooled to be shut ins, but I do expect some extra difficulty in empathizing with those who are significantly different from you. (Not that it is impossible or something, just more difficult)
"It isn't an issue of being anti-social, it is an issue of being exposed to a vast and diverse set of different people with different biases, backgrounds, and abilities."
School is a homogenization factory, by design. I'd be more confident in homeschoolers meeting people with different "biases, backgrounds, and abilities" than in traditional school.
It's worth remembering that schools are an incredibly artificial construct that are barely a hundred years old, and school as we know it is younger than that. It's cognitively tempting, but wrong to treat schooling as the obviously-correct "default answer" against which everything else must strive to be measured... in reality, it's a fairly new idea with at best a mixed track record, and if viewed with historically-informed perspective, one with a lot of serious problems, not least of which is the observed fact of systematic squashing of intellectual curiousity.
And remember, when observed fact and theory clash, observed fact wins. It doesn't matter that theoretically school shouldn't do that. It does.
(In fact, to the list of school's crimes personally I'd add that it has created an entire society trained to trust academic theories over observed fact. But that's another discussion.)
Further, there are plenty of people who come out of school exceedingly poorly "socialized", which can also often be traced back to the artificial social conditions of school itself, combined with the cohort system's effect of requiring each new class of kindergarteners being required to construct a new social system from scratch, which is, of course, inevitably a very childish and immature one compared to one in which younger children are folded into a richer social structure formed by children of many ages. I reject the idea that schooling as we know it produces "perfectly socialized" children. It produces school-socialized children, which isn't the same thing. It's a great deal of the reason why we seem to be infantalized at an older and older age and this failed "socialization" is one of the major reasons I believe the current school system needs to be fully replaced... the "socialization" the current system produces is not a triumph but one of its major glaring flaws.
I have a feeling that the public schools in the 2nd century Roman Empire were significantly different from modern public schools, especially in the United States.
I expect they were more similar to US schools of 100 years ago than the US schools of today are (modulo being a lot more aristocratic in their student population).
All of these points go against both my personal experience and the results of research I've seen on these topics. I encourage you to find and post evidence for these claims.
Home-schooled kids aren't permanently crippled and unable to succeed or something, but the range of people they are able to relate to and understand is diminished I think.
Non-academic groups are definitely good, but many of those often involve a great deal of like-mindedness (such as church groups, or groups sponsored by church groups). I don't expect you or other people who were home-schooled to be shut ins, but I do expect some extra difficulty in empathizing with those who are significantly different from you. (Not that it is impossible or something, just more difficult)