A lot of the "socialization" you learn in school is very dissimilar to "real life" though. I don't know many workplaces that are organized into teams of 25 emp

A lot of the "socialization" you learn in school is very dissimilar to "real life" though. I don't know many workplaces that are organized into teams of 25 employees all the exact same age with just one single supervisor decades older as the sole person they spend much time with that isn't their exact age. School's great weakness regarding socialization is it mostly teaches people how to get along with others who are the exact same age. It overemphasizes this and creates a strange cultural bubble where kids (and later young adults) are overly disconnected from the culture of older and younger generations. So much of what kids "learn" in school is from being around each other-- and what do other kids know? Not much, either. This is the blind leading the blind. There is no good reason for this, it's just an artifact of running schools in a seemingly cost efficient way. But because we've grown up with it for a few generations now, many of us will try to justify segregating people by exact age as natural and valuable in and of itself, when it's not. If schools mixed ages more, I'd be willing to consider school "good for socialization" but there is very little about the school environment that resembles anywhere most kids will have to spend a lot of time in as adults, especially successful ones.