high school as a business model

Doc Searls has a post up Curing High School.  Homeschoolers talk about socialization and discuss how children and adolescents fare when they spend more time outside the hierarchical peer camps of our current school structure.  Many homeschoolers feel children and youths are better socialized when they have strong family ties and spend time in groups that are not solely peers.  Some unschoolers discuss how the entire schooling process impacts our ways of thinking and categories about learning as they attempt to live free of these categories and limits. (Just as Searls discusses moving past corporate silos of blogging ... )

The viewpoints of software developers, their mental models of social interactions, their unconscious acceptance of the high school social experience, define how they build the applications that, in turn, define activity on the web. If all developers were homeschooled, would our apps differ?

I often wonder about search and its overemphasis on peers/popularity/links (outmoded by the social web)  versus search modeled on a natural process or mathematical patten that occurs in nature like the Fibonacci series.   Better yet, give me 17 buttons, one for each type of symmetry and I'll be happy.

From Searls' blog (he then quotes Whitman):

Wishing for popularity and approval is a mark of adolescence, a term invented to describe a normative high school condition—specifically, one in which childhood is prolonged. The best cure I know is chug down some Whitman.