Nonetheless, I am glad that public education is compulsory here.

Forcing all children to go to the same schools is essential if you want children to have equal opportunities in life.

1. It gives the children coming from disfunctional households a chance to escape and a chance to be helped.

2. It guarantees that the child recieves an education that has a certain basic level in a broad range of subjects, independently of what the parents find relevant or interesting. I bet there are quite a few parents or future parents on this site who think that teaching children about art or literature is a waste of time. There are also people out there who think the same about history or math.

3. Children recieve an education from people that are associated with education. Not only will uncomfortable subjects such as the Holocaust (very central to education in Germany) or sexual education be covered, but they will also be taught by teachers whose relation to the children is free of all the emotional baggage of the relation between children and their parents.

4. Children need to socialize with other children

5. In public school, children "see" the part of society that their parents would like to ignore, be it out of ideological reasons or out of conveniende. If you are a person who leads a good life, free of the problems that plague the society you live in, you are very likely to either shield your children, or unknowingly only expose them to the bubble in which you live. Both things are bad for the children and even worse for society as a whole.

Regarding your last point: There should normally be enough time out of school to improve on the education that the children receive in the fields that you deem more important. It might well be that through public education we lose some outcome in one potential "megabrain" or two, but the overall gain for society that comes from improvement "at the bottom" IMO far outweighs that. Also, the smart kids usually find a way to dig into what interests them, even if you can push them along only a little.

1. A chance but a good one? What promise do you have that bad families want to keep their children home anyway? Even making that choice suggests a lot of love for their children-it is a sacrifice after all.

2. How? Students in the US routinely score poorly and the system continues, teachers aren't fired, nothing changes really.

3. Why is this necessarily a good thing? Just having a degree doesn't make you qualified to do anything useful. I've interviewed enough software engineers with degrees from great schools who can't seem to program at all to say this is true.

4. On what basis? Also shouldn't parents be more aware of than you?

5. Parents can expose their children to that in any number of ways.

I don't homeschool but these arguments are naive at best. My guess is that in Germany the average school is better than in the US but freedom means people potentially make choices that you don't like. That's part of the package.

However, one thing I would point out is that your country (Germany) is much more culturally homogeneous than the United States. For example, I don't think there is a significant portion of the population who are religious fundamentalists and don't believe the theory of evolution. So it's much easier to come up with a standardized list of basic information that everyone can agree is worth teaching all children, without getting into endless political and legal wrangles like those that occur in the US over what material should be taught in public schools.