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“the children do it themselves.”

I’m sorry, but that doesn’t cut it for higher level classes. The children cannot grade their own technical writing assignment, philosophy paper, or science lab. There has to be a second party evaluating their work.

They may be able to ‘do it themselves’ up until around the 5th grade, where class revolves around rote memorization or black and white answers...but after that a real human is required to at least ‘grade’ the work, challenge to premise of papers, correct stylistic errors in writing, etc. Quite frankly, although I admit to not knowing this guy’s entire curriculum, I am positive that a child left to ‘do it themselves’ throughout high school will get a GED, but have a non-robust education....they will not have reached their full potential.

And that one statement “the children do it themselves” could be used as a billboard ad by anti-homeschoolers to prove their point.

Some people can home school, and I applaud that. But I’m not going to make an amateur attempt at it because I think the kids can be put on autopilot. You’ve either got to be all in, or send them to public schools.

Correction to my prior post; it was not the Glorious Revolution I was referring to but Pride's Purge and the trial of Charles I.

Regarding "do it themselves", you have to read the story. I'm surprised that you did not (you would have commented on it if you read it, because it deals with precisely that objection). This man is a PhD and his eldest son was doing calculus by the time he was 16.

Regarding making an "amateur" attempt, if you graduated high school, you've been through the material successfully yourself. Trigonometry, history and classic literature have not changed; the parent has the teaching copies of the texts. If you've ever caught a glimpse of them while you were in school, they lay out the answers, whatever the subject. After all, that is what the public school teachers are using.

The idea of needing some professional teaching ability is a farce. While there are a few basic ideas if one wants to interactively "teach" a class - most of the teachers I had in public school (a NJ suburb) were horrifically bad at it. Something as basic as "Ask, Pause, Call" that my father was taught in his training in the National Guard on how to give training classes stuck out in my mind as I sat in hours of classes where most of the class was not thinking but playing high school social games, "zoning out", etc.

I was struck by the waste of time while I was in school, where I knew that if I was just given the materials and allowed to work by myself I'd whip through things in no time. And this was back in the 70's and 80's - and I only heard about this Robinson guy a couple years ago. In elementary school I remember spending literally about 80%-90% of the time quietly, patiently waiting for the class to finish work or understand a concept, and most people waited, just not as long. The class was moving at the speed of the slowest students.

As far as teachers grading papers - that's a real joke. I saw a paper worse than mine in HS in a class where the teacher disliked my humor and had her preppy favorites. My classmate showed me his paper, two grades higher than mine but clearly worse. I had another English teacher, well into the year of "all B's" tell me to my face that she had me "pegged as a B student" from the beginning. Seeing how idiotic it all was, I just coasted. I was still accepted to every college I applied to, had the Navy romancing with a several-day dog-and-pony show at the Naval Academy, and had the highest "balanced" SAT in my class of over 400. While some had higher math or higher verbal or even higher combined, no one had a higher score than me in both. And I did that while spending countless hours in every band they had, all year long, no less than the top 3 of the trumpets all 4 years.

Homeschool will involve a lot of parental time actually finding a good curriculum that a) enables them to pass standardized tests and b) actually fills in a lot of blanks that the public education leaves.

In recent years, dealing with stepchildren's schooling, I found out the hard way that - the parent has to spend inordinate amounts of time anyway going over their child's curriculum and examining it six ways to Sunday just to know what the brainwashing is that you will have to spend inordinate amounts of time deprogramming.

IMHO, sending to public schools and tolerating the brainwashing is the greatest disservice a parent can do for their child. I did not happen to go into the details of Robsinson, but it would be wisest, of course, to ensure Reformed Biblical doctrine, a lot of history that is commonly missing (keeping in mind that a lot of history studies today are flat out wrong, i.e., students should learn both what they "need to say" and what's true), and good overview of literature.

Another point that anti-homeschoolers omit from their arguments is that tutors can be employed very effectively to supplement direct parental supervision.

IMHO...