> it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid
This has been touched upon elsewhere by other commenters. But to at least ask you personally, would you concede that if you were doing well on tests despite the absence of the kind of cramming / teaching-to-the-test that the average schooled student receives, you could have done any kind of education, and in many ways, there is nothing special at all about homeschooling? Or that if your structure re-enacts this teaching, but it's a lot less time than the average student, you definitely have a natural aptitude for test taking?
Are tests the only way we can robustly evaluate a kid's education, until they are 18? If so, will sports matter if you're getting bad test scores? What does?
Here's the crazier conclusion. That people finger parental income or cultural values as the biggest factors of education outcomes, and in reality test performance is mostly genetic. It might as well be, from a policy perspective, randomly assigned - God rolls a 100 sided dice when you're born, and if it's a 1 or a 2 all standardized tests are easy for you. If you roll the other 98 numbers, the best thing is to cram.
We don't need alternatives to traditional schooling. We need a way of evaluating kids that rewards genuine learning. Kids who are learning should be scoring poorly sometimes, and that's the exact opposite of how children are evaluated, and poor scores are the exact opposite of what most parents of high achievers want.
Earnest parents are really seeking true learning. On the flip side, parents who send their kids to cram school or kvetch about college admissions not being fair because colleges consider factors other than totally and utterly gameable, zero-learning standardized tests - they are the antagonists. They are ruining our education system, they make school look the way it does, they are seeking a completely worthless advantage for their children (high test scores in the absence of valuable learning via cram school) for some cynically, utterly selfish devotion to values like making money and buying expensive things. Values so primitive and debasing that human cultures around the world have refined, multi-thousand-year-old refutations of materialism - opposition to materialism (asceticism) may be the most mature philosophy of all of history, at least as dominant as family values and theism. And then, to rationalize all of this, they find the least privileged and disadvantaged families and blame them instead! All the while pretending that there's some sort of equivalence of shittiness in their situations, because of some fucking number like income, between their families and the Other. It's complete and total bullshit.
Some changes to the school system can help everyone live happier lives and learn more, like different children spending longer (or shorter) times in class.
But really, we have to throw out tests. Or invent a test so sophisticated that it avoids being gamed by cramming.
We have to get 300 million people to kind of internalize (or at least be vaguely familiar with) a small number of algorithms (constructing/reading a written sentence, long division, mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell).
That's the point of the broader education system, and that's all that really matters.
Kids who are curious will follow some weird path and do all kinds of cool shit, kids with money will follow some orchestrated path that makes their parents happy, and most kids will do some variant of a contrived path at a community college and/or state school.
So, who cares? None of it matters. It's 2020. There's no card catalog. There's no ENIAC in the basement that some dweeb wearing a pocket-protector gatekeeps. Feynman doesn't have to sign off on your lab time. HOPE is on DVD, K&R is free on PDF, some crazy guys in the bay are selling DIY CRISPR kits, 3D printers are $200, FPV drone racing is affordable, and Steam sales are so cheap it makes my head spin (they remade both RE1 and Half Life!!!). They sell 2600 at Barnes and Noble for god's sake.
You can buy Knuth on Amazon, Erickson is available on NoStarch, and Xorpd's Udemy course is like $20 bucks. If you're a curious person, that will keep you pretty busy until you build Ben Eater's 8-bit computer, and work your way through building Dave Gingery's entire machine shop, and finish the Coursera Bioinformatics specialization. Then you can discover trad climbing and spend a sabbatical at Yosemite Camp 4 planning how you're gonna free The Nose on El Cap. That will give you plenty of time to ponder your first FreeBSD device driver, which will give you technical skills to construct your first botnet that you sell to the FSB for enough to film your first music video at your crib in Quetzaltenango. If you're smart and curious, you're busy no matter what bullshit job you have to do or what bullshit tests you have to take.
Tests, no tests, who cares? The hackers hack, the lanyard guys swipe in at FAANG, the boring people stress about their tests, and the weirdos make a living playing online poker from a palapa in Thailand.
There is no question that tests are terrible, are gamed, and get in the way of actual learning. How to replace them with something better and still measure performance is an open question.
However I think the biggest benefits of homeschooling are being ale to get customized 1 on 1 attention, and learning how to learn. That is the meta skill of being self driven, self disciplined in acquiring new skills. A lot of people that go through the public school system seem afraid of that or unable to do that. They were the people most likely to wash out of college in the first year, because they couldn't deal with the relative lack of structure compared to high school.
This has been touched upon elsewhere by other commenters. But to at least ask you personally, would you concede that if you were doing well on tests despite the absence of the kind of cramming / teaching-to-the-test that the average schooled student receives, you could have done any kind of education, and in many ways, there is nothing special at all about homeschooling? Or that if your structure re-enacts this teaching, but it's a lot less time than the average student, you definitely have a natural aptitude for test taking?
Are tests the only way we can robustly evaluate a kid's education, until they are 18? If so, will sports matter if you're getting bad test scores? What does?
Here's the crazier conclusion. That people finger parental income or cultural values as the biggest factors of education outcomes, and in reality test performance is mostly genetic. It might as well be, from a policy perspective, randomly assigned - God rolls a 100 sided dice when you're born, and if it's a 1 or a 2 all standardized tests are easy for you. If you roll the other 98 numbers, the best thing is to cram.
We don't need alternatives to traditional schooling. We need a way of evaluating kids that rewards genuine learning. Kids who are learning should be scoring poorly sometimes, and that's the exact opposite of how children are evaluated, and poor scores are the exact opposite of what most parents of high achievers want.
Earnest parents are really seeking true learning. On the flip side, parents who send their kids to cram school or kvetch about college admissions not being fair because colleges consider factors other than totally and utterly gameable, zero-learning standardized tests - they are the antagonists. They are ruining our education system, they make school look the way it does, they are seeking a completely worthless advantage for their children (high test scores in the absence of valuable learning via cram school) for some cynically, utterly selfish devotion to values like making money and buying expensive things. Values so primitive and debasing that human cultures around the world have refined, multi-thousand-year-old refutations of materialism - opposition to materialism (asceticism) may be the most mature philosophy of all of history, at least as dominant as family values and theism. And then, to rationalize all of this, they find the least privileged and disadvantaged families and blame them instead! All the while pretending that there's some sort of equivalence of shittiness in their situations, because of some fucking number like income, between their families and the Other. It's complete and total bullshit.
Some changes to the school system can help everyone live happier lives and learn more, like different children spending longer (or shorter) times in class.
But really, we have to throw out tests. Or invent a test so sophisticated that it avoids being gamed by cramming.