> Homeschooling your kids is one of the worst decisions a person can make. It encourages taking the easy way out, and only achieves making the child socially repressed. Bad idea.

That's a pretty judgmental call. I know where you're coming from, but I don't think it's that simple.

For starters, homeschooling is far from "easy." If anything, packing them off to a public school is the easy way out: it's less time-consuming than homeschooling by far, and it's cheaper than either homeschooling or a private school.

It's unfair to say that homeschooling "only" achieves making the child socially repressed. Whether or not homeschooled children inherently have social problems or not, they (on average) get a pretty great education. Though state laws vary greatly, homeschooled children are generally still held to a curriculum, and the individual attention of parents is more conducive to the important special attention of strengthening the child's weaknesses and nurturing the child's particular gifts.

Development of social skills is also what I see as the primary problem area for homeschooling. Children need to be around other children -- play with them, argue with them, compete with them, collaborate with them, etc -- to develop the important interpersonal skills that are so important for development into a well-rounded adult that's a productive member of society and not completely annoying to be around.

But it's not an unsurmountable problem! Parents who are aware of this important ingredient in a child's education have all kinds of options, creative though they usually must be, for socializing their children outside of a school. I've seen a lot of homeschooled children with very weak social skills, but I've seen others that are just fine. It all depends on the individual needs of the child and, more so, the direction the parents take in coordinating their childrens' education outside of the textbooks.

So you know a bit about who I am, I was not homeschooled -- I went to public schools not only in different parts of the United States but overseas as well. I don't plan to homeschool my theoretical children, although that may change when it's time to make that decision based on the quality of the local public schools, the availability of funds for other options, and the particular needs I see in the children themselves. Bottom line, I'm not reacting negatively to your post just because I was homeschooled or am homeschooling children.

Life is rarely as black and white as your post implies. I've come to believe, through a wide variety of experiences in different aspects of life, very strongly in the fact that nothing is inherently wrong or evil of itself: it is the misuse of things that makes it wrong or evil. Some things are more conducive to productive use than others, of course. But to make a blanket statement about homeschooling with very little evidence that the question has been studied objectively, empirically or philosophically, is not a statement that carries much weight with me.