I know I couldn't educate my kids to university enrollment standard other than in physics, maths and such. That would cross out half their possibilities in education at least.
Other than the elite schools, I suspect you overestimate the standards and requirements.*
If you have a successful white collar career, you are at least a mediocre writer. That may be enough to pass on to your kids and get them into many schools. If you acknowledge your gaps - sounds like you have - even better, now you can fill them with anything from online courses (anywhere from free to expensive), tutoring (expensive), local community college (depends), or even trading favors with other parents with opposite skills gaps (bartering ftw).
* I have a homeschooled kid looking at colleges now and the standards are lower than I expected. He passed the minimum requirements years ago.
Often you don't have to educate kids if they don't see education as a chore.
Restricting things like television and access to video games can lead to boredom. Boredom is a gift that leads to socialization or exploration.
Many of these 'elite schools' are possible to transfer into, and a bigger predictor of success than prior learning is wanting to explore.
Transferring from there to other schools in the US was pretty straightforward and there weren't any application essays until grad school.
But they've all been able to learn when faced with a problem. Most learning up to high school is pretty decidedly useless. Most high school subjects, like math, are taught very inefficiently and a student can catch up.
Beyond that, community college transfers to prestigious universities are common. The most important piece is the ability to learn and understanding that not knowing specific subjects will be limiting in the long run.
If you're well educated and have plenty of time and desire to educate your children they'll do well, school or not.
I disagree that parents must have lots of education, because unschooling lets the child direct their interests, and it’s easy to find other parents, tutors, resources to fill in. Neither my wife nor I could teach music but two of our unschooled kids learned to play instruments competently, for example. Music lessons didn’t cost any more than paying for school sports equipment. I agree that unschooling and homeschooling require time and patience, but that’s true of raising children in general.
I had a very special physics teacher for a few years. I know for a fact my parents couldn't replace him however hard they tried (physics wasn't high on their priority list so they probably wouldn't try any harder than the "normal" standard). I could have been something else but I know I wouldn't be what I am.
Your parents probably could have hired that special physics teacher as a tutor to supplement his likely terrible teacher’s salary. I wasn’t especially rich raising my kids and I could afford tutors, classes, activities for them. There’s a big community of homeschoolers who pitch in together to fill in the gaps. I used to give free programming classes to kids, other homeschooling parents taught music, sports, math, etc.
The biggest misconception about homeschooling is that the children are isolated and deprived of social contact and access to adults who can teach and mentor them. That may be true for people in rural areas, and it’s certainly true for religious fundamentalists who keep their children out of a society they view as dangerous or immoral. But there’s a big world of secular homeschoolers (in the US, at least) and if my kids wanted to study physics — not my expertise — I could have found tutors and classes for them. They could have attended college classes as teenagers in Oregon at least.
The point of this approach to education isn't to say that teachers are unnecessary or that parents possess all of the knowledge that their children will need. It's that children have an innate curiosity that is woefully underutilized by conventional educational systems, which if encouraged can lead to the counter-intuitive result in which children teach themselves or seek out mentors on their own.
In my particular case, we were a weekly fixture at our local small town library, which fed my curiosity about chemistry and to some extent electrical engineering. Thankfully dial-up ISPs started to pop up around the time I was getting seriously into computers, so I was able to download an freeware C compiler and...well I'm posting on HN so it's obvious how that turned out.
Might I have had a similarly inspiring programming teacher at our local public school? I suppose it's possible. Might I have turned out just as intellectually curious and confident after years of public middle and high school? I doubt it but who knows. Was I in any way limited by the bounds of my parents' knowledge or ability to each? Not in the slightest.
Why not? And why would you have to?
I got my kids an English tutor and an Arts tutor once a week to help where I couldn’t.
College students are always looking for work so it didn’t cost a lot.
These days the amount of subject material on YouTube would allow your kids to self learn most subjects once they have the maturity required.
For example for drawing look at what self-taught artists are putting out with just an entry level Wacom tablet.
The exceptions would probably be language (speaking) and topics like carpentry which are very practical.
Well if you put it that way, of course hiring a private tutor on every subject is in now way worse than school.
I’m not sure what you are expecting?
Most subjects I can learn well enough to teach and help out but there are some I don’t have any talent for.
I’m saying the cost to cover those gaps is minimal and it is easy and effective.
I understand the ~$70/week I paid tutors is unaffordable for some - but it’s also a lot less than the $10k+/year my state spends per kid.
And it’s 1:1 or 1:2 tuition instead of 1:30.