It routinely happens in families and friends groups of parents (kids of parents friend bully the kid). It the setup described above, the kid have less choice over who friends will be.

School often serves as a release from parents' social machinations to let you find your own friends from a sampling of the general public.

> No parent's agenda is for their child to be kicked around by another kid.

The consequence is that every parent, given a scenario where they feel their kid is being kicked around, will remove their kid from that situation.

That's not a healthy absolute either.

Would "we must force parents to keep their kids in situations where they (the parents) believe the children are being abused, to make sure the kids grow up tougher than their parents desires would result in," be a solution anyone would actually want?

I'd want that for my kids, because I think it'd be net-best for them.

Clearly, I'm not talking about extreme abuse.

But I am talking about more discomfort than I (as the parent) would want for the child in my ideal world.

Parenting is always wanting your child to suffer as little as possible. But a little suffering is good in the long run for the child.

Thus, the fundamental tension in letting parents be the ultimate arbiters of a child's experience.

You want your children to experience more abuse than you want them to experience?

I think you're intentionally using term the abuse, in contrast to the words I used, to be inflammatory.

But yes, I think it's healthy for my children to experience more suffering than I, ceteris paribus, would permit them to experience, if I were omnipotent.

I'm using the word abuse because I am referring to abuse as distinct from the abstract kind of suffering that's impossible to have any opinions for or against because it might include hiking long-distance. ;)

Where does a kid walking up to your kid and saying "That shirt looks dumb on you" once a week fall?

Pretty far north of some of the things that happen in the rougher of our public schools.

Right, because children are never abused at home…

I added the phrase "by another kid" so nobody would reply with that but it looks like it didn't work because... you might not have read to the end? :-P

That other kid could well be a sibling

Isn't the whole premise of this grouped home schooling that it makes life easier for the parents, at the expense of tying into some commitments? There surely can never be enough grouped home schooling setups in any given locality with the freedom to break existing commitments for a parent to easily swap between them. It seems like there is a strong incentive for a parent to stick to the status quo.