Bryan Caplan: Our Homeschooling Odyssey
My education was the inverse of this in many ways. I was home schooled through 6th grade, privately schooled through high school and went to a major public research university for undergrad.<p>The biggest difference between my story and the OPs is simply the educator&#x27;s expertise level. Not everyone has a parent who is a PhD in STEM while being extremely well versed in humanities at the same time. I was lucky to have a mom who was a kindergarten teacher.<p>So my theory is that the mode of education&#x27;s value is proportional (roughly speaking) to the quality of the educational resources within that institution. For normal folks like my parents, that meant the value was maximized while I was young and declined as my education advanced outside of their expertise. Had I needed to rely on my mom&#x27;s calculus teaching skills to learn calculus I would have been missing out on those kids&#x27; competent calculus teacher mentioned in the article for example.<p>Additionally, kids learn family culture over the full time they are in your household. Training kids to read and compute is trivial in importance compared to teaching them the value system you believe works well to make you a functioning adult in a complex and ambiguous world. Home schooling and public schooling alike are actually of secondary importance to this primary mission of parenting. Put differently, the OPs kids would have excelled regardless of their educational environment because their family culture inculcated them with high achieving standards. It&#x27;s clear from the article that their success was never taken for granted or expected. They had to work hard for their admission to college and their family culture inspired them to rise to the occasion.