> It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public.

I'm baffled by this. Many workplaces? Mass transit? Walking down the sidewalk? At a concert? Buying groceries? True, there don't all expose you to the full sweep of human existence at once but, in aggregate, it seems pretty similar to what you'd encounter at most public schools. What if they want a career in a hospital, or law enforcement, or social services, ... the list goes on.

You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble, but it seems to me they need to be prepared for a future where they encounter all kinds of people. I'm sure this can be compatible with homeschooling but I can't see how it's not generally a disadvantage. (Though perhaps onerous clearly outweighed by other advantages, depending on the situation.)

The closest social equivalency to public school socialization I can think of is prison. You're stuck there for N hours per day with limited or zero control over what other people you're around. Maybe parts of military training might also be similar.

That's the kind of thing that is very much not like the "real world." It's more than just being "exposed" to less optimal peers (like you would on a bus), it's an entirely different social experience.

Home schooled kids walk down sidewalks, go to concerts, go grocery shopping.

Most workplaces are highly filtered. The whole interview process is specifically geared towards filtering out undesirable people.

You don’t have to sit side-by-side rubbing shoulders and squabbling with rabble for 12 years in order to understand and deal with it, just like you don’t have to wrestle with gators for 12 years to learn respect for nature.

> You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble

I think it's telling that the other responses seem to focus on exactly this; the idea that their child will exist in a class apart from the rabble, and will not have to interact with them.

It seems to speak to two very different views of community. On the one hand, there is community as a collection of all the people in a space: people who share local resources, frequent the same local businesses, and have the same local concerns. On the other, there is a community of choice: people who share the same social class, and possibly the same religion or cultural beliefs. I think it's fair to say that you can have both, but trying to say that you can belong solely to the communities you choose and treat everyone else as beneath notice sounds quite problematic, and it will absolutely not give children a correct or complete view of the world.