Nothing in the article surprised me. We’ve had a lot of experience with home-schooled students at Oglethorpe, and they’ve uniformly been impressive. Unlike many of their public schooled colleagues, they’re not merely concerned with "what will be on the test," but appear actually to love learning. Indeed, our experience with these students led us to pull the trigger quite early when our seven year old son began to hate going to public school. He’s home now, much happier, blitzing through his math, and loving all the history he gets to read with his mom and the science he does with his dad.

I may retire at some point from teaching other people’s children and educate my youngsters at home when my wife goes back to work after raising them as infants. There are just too many benefits from home-schooling and almost none I can think of in going to a bureaucratic school with the artificial age-cohort that we create in our society. After all, real "socialization" takes place with friends, neighbors, members of the church community, extended family, wiser older adults, grandparents, etc., not just from a bunch of kids who happen to be the same age in the community. And, socialization can take place in athletics, Boy Scouts, church, etc., rather than with a bunch of violent thugs and drug-users that populate our school. Besides the socialization, exploring all the great works of literature and history with a student teacher ratio of 1:2 sounds like a great education to me, not to mention trips to museums, Europe, and across the good old US of A to actually see where history occurred. But, alas, my wife may want to explore the benefits of an independent, Catholic school. Not perfect, but a helluva lot better than public schools. I’m sure glad that the Democrats are against vouchers and Bush has caved in with his huge federal education bill. We need less freedom, more public schools, and less of a family role in education. Note the sarcasm.