No, I don't believe my grandparents were idiots but I do know for a fact that they were uneducated

*laughs* Un-socialized? Maybe. Uneducated? Hardly. People who go through homeschooling are generally far more educated than your average high school graduate. I can't even say normal high school is great for socialization either. If you don't manage to integrate yourself into one of the various groups of popular people, it's very likely that you'll spend high school as an outcast, with maybe a friend or two, and that doesn't do much for socialization.

I do believe homeschooling can hold a kid back!! And my grandparent and great-grandparents went to school!! They didn't all finish but they went!! They are not idiots either!! In fact my Grandpa even went back and got his GED!!

I'm not against homeschooling, but my great grandmother was a very smart lady that wouldn't leave the house. She didn't know how to deal with people very well and preferred being at home where she was more comfortable.

I'm sorry, I believe that neither my grandparents nor great-grandparents were home schooled - at least only the ones that could afford a proper Governess and a University education afterward. I am not against home schooling. I am against the dangerous, elitist, 'holier than thou' bias that some parents push into their children's minds and who use the separatism of homeschooling to achieve that, but as far as academic subjects go, a lesson is a lesson, wherever it is. I also believe that if the world is full of jerks, its better to have your children learn some appropriate coping strategies somehow, before they hit adulthood and find all the hard social lessons (and all the jerks) hit them all at once.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_education Public education is a fairly recent concept, recent enough to still be experimental. Its roots go back to the 1600's in the US, but it didn't become common until the 1800's. Even when it became common, it was delivered in one-room schoolhouses, built by the families in the neighborhood. The families would hire a teacher to teach a term or two as they could afford it. School was by no means a regular, expected thing. Boys didn't go to school during the farming season, so at most they got six months of school a year, and even then they would stay home if there was important work to do on the farm. The consolidated, graded school is a product of the twentieth century. My grandmother attended one of the first in Eastern Pennsylvania, and it opened the year she started school, in 1925. She got to attend all the way through high school. Her younger siblings got caught by the depression and several had to drop out and get a job in 3rd or 4th grade. Many areas of the country, including my current home state, didn't get consolidated schools in every county until the fifties. My generation is probably the first for which consolidated schools were available pretty much everywhere in the country, except maybe the large expanse of lightly populated states like Montana. So it stands to reason that for most of us, our grandparents and great-grandparents may or may not have gone to a consolidated public school. Many of them may have gone to a one-room school house. Many may have dropped out early to work. More than a few may have been educated at home. If this is true, are your grandparents and great-grandparents unsocialized and uneducated?

As a Libertarian I believe in choice in this matter. So does, apparently, John Holt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Caldwell_Holt