An argument against home schooling is that teachers are *trained professionals* Should parents be able to perform surgery on their kids at home just because they think they can, and its *their* kids bodies? Or would you say that surgery is best left to trained surgeons? Frankly teachers and teaching get far, *far* less respect in this day and age than in the past. These days everyone thinks they can teach. As if the best public education teachers were just folks picked up off the street who hadn't spend years learning how to do what they do.

Yes there are plenty of cases of succesful home schooling, but the nature of it means those are the ones we are primarily going to hear about. We will rarely hear about the bad cases of home schooling, the kids pulled out of public school by hardline evangelicals with political agendas who think secular types are evil, and who will raise their kids in a closeted, warped environment so they can ensure that they grow up into closeted warped s.

Our schools are the foundations of our future society. We must use the utmost care and training in educating new generations. This work must be left to trained professionals and these new generations must be nurtured in an enviroment where they are PART of society, and not hidden from it.

Home schooling is not something that should be encouraged. Even if it can be done well, and it can, it doesn't change the overriding issues. Give public school teachers the same level of respect you'd give surgeons. Let them do their job, and stop thinking you are so brilliant you can do heart surgery better and cheaper than they can.