As someone who spent all of my formative years in relatively good public schools, and had mostly positive experiences all the way through, I would actually have

As someone who spent all of my formative years in relatively good public schools, and had mostly positive experiences all the way through, I would actually have to say that socialization is one of the strongest aspects of home-schooling. The peer dominated socialization of public schools can quickly degenerate into "Lord of the Flies" type behavior, especially as class sizes grow. My hypothesis is that with home schooling, assuming that the kids aren't cloistered in the home, the result is simply that they have more exposure to seeing adults interacting with each other as adults, and therefore are more accustomed to that form of interacting. When I was young the home schooled kids did seem a bit off, but by the time I got to college the trend seemed to that they were consistently more mature and "ready" for the adult world than average. That said, I would not tell people to home school unless they were prepared for it. Kids can still have positive experiences at public school; it just depends on the kid. EDIT: for clarity