I'll give it a shot: I wouldn't say useless at all, but the main reason I won't be homeschooling my children is that I don't think I'm smart enough to do a better job than an entire school full of educators.

I'm sure various arguments can be made for whether or not that's true of different people (and teachers), but I grew up in a pretty mediocre school system and still had very smart teachers teaching cool classes that were so, so good because of their very specialized knowledge. I can see how K-8 might be much easier to replace with homeschooling, but I have a hard time with secondary school.

If my mom had taught me high school chemistry, for example, she could have gone through the book and lessons with me with minimum difficulty. But I had a chemistry teacher who'd left being a college professor/researcher so he could be back with younger students, and he was amazingly smart and fun to learn from. I'd have missed that completely.

The author of the article comes from another angle entirely: It's a situation where the high school teachers' specialized knowledge isn't nearly good enough. I get that too. If I was a quantum physicist, I'd bet dollars to donuts I could cook up a better physics student than your average college-prep science class -- but that doesn't mean I'd be better at everything else that happens in high school, too.

Maybe because of the author's attitude: " All of a sudden I was frustrated that she was stuck wasting her time in high school taking yet another history class, when she could be doing what she wanted to do with her life and spending all day learning skills that will help her in her chosen career." This is the worst reason to take someone out if school, and enough to make me think her homeschooling will be skewed. Learning history and other arts and sciences is not a waste. She doesn't need to learn a career at 16. She just needs to learn