[tracilicious]

There's a basic assumption here that I would like to challenge. Not all people need to know the same things. I remember almost nothing of 95% of what I learned in school. Yet I'm functioning in our society quite well. My husband hated school and did poorly in it, but he spent all of his spare time messing around with computers. Ta-da! Good job as a computer guy. If a homeschooled kid spends 98% of their time on art and only 2% on "basic subjects," what does it matter as long as he can provide for himself as an adult? It isn't like there is some age cutoff where we must stop learning. If an adult feels they were shorted in math by school or their parents or whatever they can always learn it on their own.

My kids are really young so we haven't yet run across any challenges that I haven't been able to meet with the help of the internet. But we don't teach in any formal way. We expose them to a lot of life and as many interesting things as we can and they learn. Humans learn. It's what we do. The only way to dampen that natural tendency is by forcing kids to learn what they have no interest in or simply aren't ready for.