You might be confirming what I said rather than disprove it.
If you're well educated and have plenty of time and desire to educate your children they'll do well, school or not.
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.
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.
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.