[bella1]

In my small-town, small county in Michigan there are a lot of home school families. I've had up close and personal interactions with said families and have a few observations. One; the children of parents or more accurately the moms, who are themselves educated and intelligent fare much better in their education, two; the children of the less than intelligent parent well not so much. I wouldn't let some of those moms teach my dog to sit let alone teach a child, thirdly; once these children reach their teen years, more than a few of them, especially the boys, beg their parents to let them attend school. My observation has been that the parents who let their kids attend school end up with happier teens and a better relationship. I have seen the opposite with the parents who dig in their heels and refuse and end up with rebellious teens who hate them and never darken the door of a church again once they hit 18.

[cyclotic]

As a parent who homeschooled for 25 years and still know thousands of homeschoolers, your observations are exactly wrong.

No parent who subjects their children to public schools loves them.

As is easily observable, (see Baltimore schools with zero kids proficient in math and reading) the system is guaranteed to fail most kids.

Of course there are loser homeschoolers but they are complete outliers.

[Texan5]

That may be the case where you are, but you are incorrect if you assume that it is the same elsewhere. I live in a rural area of Texas where-aside from small-scale farming/ranching the main industry is tourism-particularly in Winter when snowbirds come to live here in the RV parks and cabins on/near the river from late Oct to early April or so. There are many people who live an off-grid self sufficient lifestyle by choice-. there are also lots of homeschoolers, and those numbers increase every year, as the area schools’ enrollment decreases. There is also a small local Christian school with very reasonable tuition out here-they have added another new building due to increased enrollment this last year. Public school is a last resort for most parents here...

Many parents take their kids to their home-based businesses for the workday-the kids do their schoolwork in the back office while mom or dad does their job as a mechanic, a shopkeeper, etc. There are more college educated people here than not-most of us moved here to get out of the corporate rat race-gone Galt. The homeschooled kids do much better academically, too. They either join the military, go off to college or join the parents’ business. Almost none of them get into drugs, etc, unlike the public schooled kids do, probably because they are not encouraged to interact with kids from the nearby large city.

Obviously your area and state are not like red state Texas. If I still had a cub at home, I wouldn’t want a public school teacher within a mile of them..