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with Doc. There is simply no comparison between the education I received in my seven years of home schooling and the ~six I spent in public schools. (Community) College was a different deal, at least for me, because I was working toward the RN degree from day one. But there were plenty of people there (probably half) who saw it as nothing more than an extension of high school.
I was pulled out of public school at age eight, and by age thirteen I had completed everything my home school network required for me to graduate high school legitimately through one of their partner/affiliated schools. I decided at age fourteen that I wanted to wrestle, so I postponed graduation and went to high school for a couple of years, marveling with a slack jaw at just how little was actually being taught in the classrooms. The AP classes were a bit better, but the homework loads were so onerous that I bailed on them. I aced very nearly every test ever put in front of me, so the idea of doing 3-4 hours of schoolwork AFTER I left seven hours of school was something that never did, or will, sit right with me (note: my TOTAL schoolworkload, if that's even a word, during my home school years was ~1.5 hours per day, and that included blasting through high school from age 11-13 because, frankly, I didn't want to draw the whole thing out any longer than absolutely necessary. Though to be fair to the comparison, my older brother needed about 2.5 hours per day to accomplish largely the same goals.)
I'm 33 years old, so my experience is probably still within a couple of degrees of what's going on nowadays in public schools. I have yet to meet a parent whose kids were home schooled who didn't have great things to say about it. I've known a few people for whom it wasn't a great fit (my sister, for one, and we kept her in public school after trying at home for a couple of years) but the vast majority are simply amazed at how much their kids learn, and how much extra time they have on their hands as a family. Read any study of home school outcomes vs. public school outcomes, even those normalized for family income, geography, and parental education level, and they all have the home schoolers ahead very nearly across the board. Even the socializing aspect, which frequently gets brought up as a supposedly self-evident negative facet of home schooling, shows that home schoolers are better adjusted socially than their publicly schooled counterparts. If you can't do it better institutionally compared to doing it at the home, then you probably need to overhaul (or scrap!) the institution, no? That's what a free market would do, anyway...
Now, obviously, a stay-at-home parent is a seriously beneficial component of the system, but a grandparent works also if the kids are ~well behaved. But my mom once said, in her usually concise fashion, "It takes me less time to help you guys with your schoolwork each day, here at home, than it does for me to prepare your meals, drive you to school, and pick you up again each day. This is a no-brainer; now let's do some anatomy! ::begins cutting open a cow's heart*, eliciting 'ooh's' and 'aaah's' from her spellbound children::"
To my mind, and based purely on my own personal experience at a high school with over a thousand attendees, the modern public school system is little more than a disgraceful daycare system filled with political agendas that are forced on the attendees. That's harsh, I know, but it's how I see it - and how I saw it when I was wrestling for those two years. It is a colossal failure on every level imaginable. Even Diderot's example of school shootings, which are generally blamed entirely on guns, owe the basis of their existence to this horribly failed system.
*during this particular anatomy lesson we learned the names of the various structures of the heart, drew our own versions of them, and were quizzed on said structures for several days. After we had passed that particular course, we ate the heart. It was chewy, but good. My mom was an amazin' cook ;-)