It's not the number of variables that is the issue; it's the number of people who want to express an opinion in the absence of any real knowledge or experience.

"it's just factually incorrect that public school (or private school) is uniformly horrible and soul-crushing"

That's where we differ; if the schooling is comprised chiefly of forcing a kid to sit still and listen, it is horrible and soul-crushing. It cuts directly against every evolutionary imperative that the kid is experiencing. A couple hours of sitting a day? Sure. Any more than that is just warehousing, and that's all that any school does; good or bad, they all make the kids sit down, shut up, and watch.

I come from a whole family of teachers (grandfather, uncles, mother, brother) and my brother is currently the superintendent of small school district; even he admits that school is designed for the convenience of the adults and has little or nothing to do with the needs of the kids. The different styles of teaching that have come and gone over the years amount to different colored wrapping paper on a gift box filled with dogshit.

Man, the excuses people will make to look down on home schooling.

In our area, where autism seems almost epidemic, an increasing number of parents are choosing to home school their autistic child rather than running them through the school system where all they will be is bullied, teased, alienated even further, and eventually dropped off the assembly line pre-broken. Any study of home schooled kids in our area that didn't account for this would of course find that the average home schooler had socialization issues; they're fucking autistic.

To my experience, normal kids in well-planned home school environments are happier, more emphatic, more motivated, and more able to interact with all ages comfortably than the kids who have to survive the numbing idiocy of school programming and its ridiculous idea that a kid's birthdate is the most important consideration when selecting peers.

School is a terrible thing to do to a good kid.

Looking at past experience and using that to model expectations of the future is "slippery slope"?

Well, shut down all the world's History departments; jklovanc says they're invalid. For that matter, shut down pretty much everything; evidently we're not allowed to learn.

As a young man, I used to really enjoy W5 (Who What When Where Why); an early investigative TV news program. I enjoyed it, in fact, right up until the day when it did a story on an industry that I actually knew a lot about; when I saw how they essentially fabricated their whole story line out of sensationalized half-truths I realized that I had been duped for years and I discarded the show entirely.

Frankly, this thread has made me feel much the same way about slashdot; the sheer number of (very angry!) posters who are pulling opinions out of their asses, who seem to think that simply having a grasp of some of the stereotypes associated with home schooling means that they actually know something is disappointing.

So let me be clear;

When you talk about the "lack of socialization" I know that you know nothing.

When you talk about "coddling" or "sheltering" kids, I know that you know nothing.

To VorpalRodent, I say that all these angry, uninformed, opinionated posters represent nothing but the intellectual inhabitants of a crab bucket, and as soon as they see a crab trying to get up over the rim they want to grab him and drag him right back down with them.

Ignore these people, because all they know is fear of the unknown and fear of taking responsibility for an important job themselves. This is what you learn from a conventional education; how to live in fear of being different.

Fuck'em; this country was founded on rebels.

If what you're saying is that there is no longer any such thing as a trusted authority, I agree. There is certainly not a single organization or representative in the medical community that I actually trust to give me a clear idea of both the benefits and the dangers of any particular drug or treatment. They're all lying liars who lie; they all have their own reasons for it, from "shareholder value" to "don't muddy the water with details" but it all boils down to lies that make it impossible to trust them when I really, really would like to be able to. Want to see how law is actually made? Look into how the national food guide is determined; actual nutritional science is is only tangentially part of the process; the rest is all lobby dollars. Is this the process you want determining what represents the best benefit/danger balance for things to inject in your kid? There's nothing wrong with the science, but the process of distinguishing good science from bad at the legislative level is profoundly broken.

Sure, there are some things that could be advantageous if they were mandatory, but as soon the lobby dollars get the legal right to force folks to inject their kids with stuff, do you think it will stop anywhere reasonable? If so, you've got a lot more faith in the basic humanity of pharma execs than I do. We can justify anything in the name of enhancing shareholder value.

One mentally ill man with a gun and delusions of grandeur does not a terrorist make.