What I always wonder about with schools and socialization is whether this is good preparation for life: kids in age-segregated classes, hierarchical relationships with grown-ups who hold power over them, strict rules about things that sometimes seem quite trivial (hands on desks instead of on your lap is the new one in my DD8's class). I think I'm with John Taylor Gatto and various others on this--there's a very specific kind of "school socialization" that is linked to the teacher's need to keep order from disintegrating into chaos. (And the more critical/radical explanations would say that part of the school socialization is about things like teaching kids to follow rules unthinkingly, ostracize non-conformists, etc.) I'm happier when school socialization is linked to something related to ethics or character development--the Virtues Project is big here, for instance.
