December beginner's tournament: Homeschooling is superior to the public primary school system

In accordance with the terms, I will be posting my arguments, and nothing else. Thanks for this debate, and thank you Hayd for organizing this tournament!I will present several points supporting the view that homeschooling is not superior to public primary schooling.1. Public schooling is critical to a kid's social development -- especially during primary.2. The economy will benefit more from a public schooling system.3. There is a moral imperative to educate in public rather than in private (tied to economics and viability of homeschooling in general).1. Public schooling is critical to a kid's social development -- especially during primary.There is a crucial component to public primary schooling that homeschooling could not even begin to address. That is social development. School is not only the place where kids learn how to count and read. It is also the place where kids meet strangers, learn to converse with peers, develop --through the thousands of unique experiences only public schooling offers -- a moral and ethical character, and learn how to navigate through society at large. "Public schools generally have a range of children from the whole gamut of socioeconomic classes and a wide variety of backgrounds. This is the type of community that most people occupy as adults, and public school is an opportunity to meet it and learn to negotiate with other points of view and understand people with diverse backgrounds and values." (3)In primary public schooling kids learn the fundamentals of reading, writing, math, and perhaps some social science. But academics is not the only essential function of public primary schooling. Learning how to communicate and work with others is extremely important. In public school, kids have to learn to cooperate with other kids, learn how and what it means to share things, make friends and make enemies, etc. These are experiences simply not shared in homeschooling. These kinds of social interactions force students to think about the consequences of their actions. It makes them think critically: communicating ideas and desires with peers will develop important thinking skills that help kids assess not just the effects of their actions, but their causes as well (i.e, self-reflection). If kids are at home studying and interacting exclusively with parents and/or a single tutor, their experiences in dealing with all of the above will be severely limited. They won"t know how to behave around kids, they won"t know how to make friends or deal with unfriendly peers, and they simply will not be as prepared as other kids in dealing with a dynamic community when they reach secondary school (if they do end up in public school). They risk feeling alienated, "different," or simply unable to fit in, which can have enormous consequences on a kid"s self-confidence and future social and personal development that goes well into adulthood.2. The economy will benefit more from a public schooling system rather than home schooling.This argument is a simple one, albeit assumptive, if not all together theoretical. If the majority of parents decide to keep their kids at home to be homeschooled by them or some tutors because it's better than going to public school, then the public schooling system will consequentially lose its predominance as an institution, and therefore a large sector of the economy will be diminished. In fact, in 2015, the U.S employed 3,100,000 teachers (1). As percentage of GDP, in 2011, education accounted for 5.2% of GDP. 5.2% of 2011s roughly $15.5 trillion GDP is roughly $775 billion. (2) That is a huge amount spent on jobs, infrastructure, and more. The theoretical elimination of the public schooling system would cut ALL sorts of jobs. Y = C + I + G + NxOutput/GDP = Consumption + Investments + Government (expenditure) + Net Exports. Here we would experience a decrease in G.A decrease in G = a decrease in Y.Theoritically, it is also quite unsustainable/impractical to have an education system focused in home schooling. There simply would not be enough educators to accomodate individual or small-group learning. And the effects of this would be extremely detrimental. Some of this is explained below in part 3.3. There is a moral imperative to educate in public rather than in private (tied to economics and viability of homeschooling in general).Private homeschooling is related to private school in that the option exists because it offers tailored and usually superior teaching: those who can afford to school their children at home have the means to do so, providing the kids with a better education. It is undisputed that children learning 1 on 1 can learn more and quicker because teaching is tailored specially to kids" needs and attention is focused on the success of just one person, whereas teaching several students at once requires divided attention. The reason this is unjust is because homeschooling depends on familial endowment. It is not fair if one household can afford homeschooling while another family would likely want to do the same but cannot because they do not have the means to do so.It also makes sense why homeschooled kids do better on standard exams. The top three homeschooling fathers" professions are accountant/engineer (17.3%), professors/doctors/lawyers (16.9%), and small business owners (10.7%). (4) This really helps to explain the achievement gap between homeschooled and public schooled children because families in good professions can provide better education for their children; they have more time and more money to focus on the education of their children.Basically, if every family thought that homeschooling was better for their children academically, then we would get wildly different results from the children across the board. In any case, this is a hypothetical because people simply cannot afford to have their children homeschooled. The reality is that with homeschooling, only the rich will benefit. The gap between the rich and poor will widen. Homeschooling is not only inviable, it is unfair.Conclusion:The public school institution allows for all students to be given a fair and equal opportunity at learning what everyone else has to learn: they are given the same holistic experience. If people decided to begin homeschooling their children instead of sending them to public school, millions of jobs would be lost, resulting in a smaller GDP. Finally, homeschooling causes a gap in academic performance between the rich and the poor; private homeschooling favors the rich, and public schooling favors everyone.Sources.1. http://nces.ed.gov...2. http://data.worldbank.org...3. http://getliner.com...4. https://www.home-school.com...