1. Those that shouldn't be homeschooling because they are not trained as educators, certainly not in all of the subjects they need to teach, but they are religiously conservative to the point of some social withdrawal, and don't want their kids going to public school and being exposed to drugs and liberalism. I've known many people in this category. BTW- I'm somewhat conservative and religious, so when I say they are conservative and religious, I mean really conservative and religious.
2. Those that are so liberal they take their kid on a round the world trip spending all of their life's savings and money from their newly-sold house to do so, homeschooling (some would say no-schooling or light-schooling) during the trip with little support or structure. When they got back they got a lower-paying job and started from ground-zero again, with their kid who disliked the trip and missed months of education. I only know one person in this category.
I have never been introduced to a no-speed-limit homeschooler.
Now you know someone who doesn't fit either of those molds :)
I'm co-moderator of a secular homeschooling group and your description doesn't really match anyone in our group (20-30 families). There are unschoolers, but there are also people who follow various approaches to varying degrees.
How many in your group of 20-30 have the qualifications that would allow them to be teachers in every subject that they teach their children if they were to apply for jobs in your public school system?
While I believe in your freedom to homeschool your children, why does the public school system have those requirements for their teachers? It isn't only to have the ability to manage kids and parents. While I believe that your group may do an excellent job at educating your students, 84% of 1.5 million students were estimated to be homeschooled only at home as of 2007 according to http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=91 , and I doubt that all of them are sufficiently qualified to teach all subjects required in their local public school.
Teachers dedicate themselves to teaching for numerous reasons. They don't take on student loans for no reason whatsoever; the credentials they get are part of the price of going into a system with intentional barriers to entry.
Don't confuse a system of "reject some of the good, weed out most of the really bad, and usually get ok results" as something which is an entirely accurate indicator of competence. The shortcomings of the current system don't make it a lie, obviously - but putting decades into a process doesn't necessarily make it better, either.
I'm saying that in many cases, if suffices for a parent to simply understand what subject materials their children need to learn, and then teach them to read well at an early age, after that parents do not necessarily need to be knowledgeable about those materials because the books contain the knowledge.
I think what I'm describing is nearly synonymous with the hacker mentality that I would expect to be held in high regard in this forum.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.p...
I'm in agreement with Diane Ravitch, the historian of education, that the college education major should be abolished. Instead students who aspire to be teachers should get a degree in any other field, and take a few courses on classroom management.
Teachers are generally intelligent and well-meaning. Their paper qualifications and their ability to actually teach are not as strongly correlated as one would hope, though. While on average I'd expect a qualified teacher to be better at teaching than a member of the general public, I know many members of the general public who are not eligible for jobs as K-12 teachers, but nonetheless are excellent at teaching both children and adults. Amusingly, one qualified teacher I know was given a crash primer in the subject he now teaches professionally by a friend of mine... after he was officially qualified to teach it. On the other hand, I know a teacher in Switzerland who spent several years telling his students random anecdotes about his life, rather than actually teaching the students anything whatsoever about the subject he's paid to teach - and this is a country with much stricter requirements for teachers than the US.
Public schools have requirements for their teachers for a number of reasons: covering themselves, filtering out some unqualified people quickly, etc. The qualifications are neither necessary nor sufficient for finding good teachers, sadly. In programming, qualifications tend to be poorly, and sometimes even negatively, correlated with ability and productivity; I'm not convinced the situation is massively different in K-12 education.
There are no magic bullets for education. Not everyone teaching is even vaguely capable of doing so; there are some horrifically incapable people teaching in the public school system, and also some who homeschool. The majority of teachers in either system do a more-or-less tolerable job, and some excel.
Each child has different needs and different strengths and weaknesses. They progress in each subject at different paces. Our daughter is 5th grade age. At this point, we're still comfortable with the education we can give her ourselves (using materials created by people with a good deal of experience teaching their subject areas!). There will likely be times when she has reached the point where we can no longer adequately teach her certain subjects. But, there are tons of resources today and more coming every day for teaching those subjects.
I was talking with one of the other dads in our group last week and they're deciding how to proceed with their 8th grader for next year, when she'd be entering high school. One of the options they're exploring is one in which she would be able to attend courses at a local community college (for free via their local school district). Programs like that exist in many places.
Homeschooling families don't live in a vacuum.
This is why logjam's argument is a pure fallacy.
But the reality is that the homeschooling movement is dynamic:
http://www.topmastersineducation.com/homeschooled/
In time, it's easy to envision the secular population outnumbering the religious.
So, to your point, if atheists had been the early adopters in this case, you would support homeschooling. But since the early adopters were religious, you are against it, correct?
Not if the Atheists were teaching their kids information we know to be wrong as solid fact.
If there was a group of Atheist KKK members supporting homeschooling so they can teach their kids that blacks are inferior we'd have the same issue.
The problem is the isolation, there's no standard that home schooling is compared against, there's no child education services that come along and ensure the student knows the alphabet.
http://www.topmastersineducation.com/homeschooled/
On a political level, the federal government has taken a hands off Jeffersonian approach (as far as I know) and let the individual states experiment. Some states are very involved while others are very hands off. You can explore the variety of approaches and see for yourself which work (if any) and which don't (if any).
The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of homeschooled kids do as well or much better than their public school counterparts when it comes to knowing the alphabet and much more (see link above). If your primary argument for outlawing/regulating it is that kids are being taught non-fact based information, let's go ahead and shut down all the churches, mosques, and synagogues while we're at it.
Thinking about it further, I actually appreciate that there are a lot of kids being homeschooled for religious reasons. It doesn't really affect me or my family in any negative way and they are creating a market where there was none -- no mean feat.
That means that people who do want to homeschool their kids for reasons I personally agree with will have more materials available that might not exist if not for the zealots.
And, ultimately, you have no right to police what I teach my children.
Homeschooling is a slippery slope. For the elite who can manage not sliding down it, I agree with it.