I homeschooled my three girls starting back when it was illegal in the state of WA. It was ridiculously easy. We did it all in about an hour and a half per day with some extras thrown in here and there.
All three are in their 30s and successful working adults.

In the early 90's I had been working with computers off and on for some 10 years and taught our 6 yo son BASIC programming on a Commodore computer connected to our 19" color TV in 1985. Apparently that early childhood recreation stuck for that is what he does for a living today.

When we started teaching our son how to educate himself we had a 286 with DOS and a 9 pin printer and a 9600 baud modem to connect to Compuserve and then later, AOL. Then we got a 486 with Win3.11 a 14.4 modem and a 24 pin and we started to make some headway. Most of what we learned about home schooling was done the hard way but first we had to *unschool* ourselves.

The biggest problem for concerned parents today is unlearning what has been programmed into them from birth - that they are incapable and only the state can do what the parents themselves have already done to a certain degree - teach their kids. They taught their kids to eat, to walk, to ride bikes, to act properly, etc., but when it comes to 2x2, and the capitals of the states, and what H2O means they go suddenly brain dead. Or lazy. Parents are told that it requires a college education to teach elementary school topics. How does that make sense? It doesn't, but for the lazy, it works.

It is far easier to teach a kids multiplication tables than it is to teach them how to use a toilet and clean themselves up afterward.

My wife wrote a best selling home education reference book about 14 years ago and was quoted by Rush Limbaugh in a Wall Street Journal article about it.

When a parent truly cares for their legacy, their children, they won't tolerate the abuse heaped upon them by the public school system. Each year more and more parents are becoming aware of 2 things, the utter lack of concern the *system* has for their kids, and that if their kids are going to get a proper education it must be outside the public school narrative.

With the internet available to all for low or no cost it is not possible today to NOT have over abundant resources to create a rich educational environment for kids that far exceeds anything the gov't run schools are even capable of providing.

I could quote facts and figures til your eyes bleed but the real issue is YOUR kids. Not mine, not his, not hers, YOURS. If you have been sufficiently convinced the gov't run school is OK for your kids then you have wasted your time reading this.

You go to public school for 12 years to be taught things that take 2 years to learn and you pay for that privilege for the rest of your life.

Once you become deinstitutionalized, you never go back. Homeschooling is a big chore, but an even bigger blessing.

Our kids were in school in the 60s and 70s. The problems we have in the schools today were just beginning. We noticed first that they cared much more about getting government money than they did about the results they were producing. The administrative staffs increased to do the paperwork required by the government. And the teacher's unions became much more interested in pay and perks than results. Also, property taxes were being raised "for the children." We were not happy, but my wife spent a lot of time volunteering, substitute teaching, and generally riding herd on what was happening. Our kids got decent educations as a result. Had she not been as involved, their education would have been much less useful. It would have been unthinkable for us to homeschool in those days - we probably would have been prosecuted - but I see it as a perfectly viable answer today.

Homeschooling is good. But this employee should have been arrested for criminal impersonation.

@blitzkrieg, I would have preferred to give her a stern ass kickin myself rather than let the state intercede and cost the taxpayers any money. But we couldn't prove she had done it. The employee had been going to night school to get her teaching degree and she knew of my wife's ongoing concern about our child's public schooling. My wife was the managing editor at this business and the employee was well, an employee, and there was some friction over a couple year period. As we keep our circle of influence very small we are 100% certain this particular person was the culprit but lacked the proof to prove it. In a month or so that employee was gone, and we moved on. As it was, that incident sparked a minor revolution within us that has exploded around the world. Call her the Crispus Attucks of the new millennia.