Home-schooled kids don’t have to read dumb-downed text-books, study subjects they hate, or endure meaningless classes six to eight hours a day. Home-schooled kids won’t be subject to drugs, bullies, violence, or peer pressure, as they are in public schools. Home-schooled children who are “different” in any way won’t have to endure cruel jokes and taunts from other children in their classes.

Slow-learning or “special-needs” children won’t be humiliated by their peers if they are put in regular classes, or further humiliated if teacher puts them in so-called spe-cial-education classes. Faster-learning home-schooled kids won’t have to sit through mind-numbing classes that are geared to slowest-learning students in a class. They won’t have to “learn” in cooperative groups where other kids in group do nothing or are not cooperative. Home-schooled children do not have to waste their time memorizing meaningless facts about subjects that bore them, just so they can pass next dumbed-down test to obey and please school authorities.

Home-schooled kids don’t have to endure twelve years of a third-rate, public-school education that leaves many students barely able to read their own diplomas. The notion that tests tell teachers and parents what children have learned turns out to false. John Holt, teacher and author of "How Children Fail," pointed out that most children soon forget what they memorized for a test as soon as test is over, so entire test-taking process is usually worthless. Facts or ideas that are not useful or relevant to children pass through them like a sieve and are soon forgotten.

Home-schooled kids don’t have to study an arbitrary, meaningless curriculum of subjects imposed on them by public-school authorities. They don’t have to be treated like little mindless, spiritless robots that have to learn same subjects at same time and in same sequence as their classmates.

Home-schooled children don’t have to sit quietly in a class of twenty-five other students and pretend they like being in this mini-prison called public school, just to avoid being punished by a teacher for “acting-out” or fidgeting in their seats.

Any adult’s mind would wander if they were forced to sit through a boring lecture for just one hour. Yet public schools expect children to sit still for boring lectures on subjects that are meaningless to them, for six to eight hours a day.

Yet this constant cry for parent cooperation is often a smoke screen pretense to make parents think they have some control over their children’s education. In most cases, parents have no such control. Teachers and principals may placate parents or ask for their cooperation, but they rarely make important changes parents ask for.

For example, most parents want their children to learn to do basic arithmetic without using calculators as a crutch. A poll by Public Agenda found that 86 percent of parents want students to learn arithmetic by hand before they use calculators. However, math-teaching policy for most public schools today is that all children beginning in kindergarten have access to calculators at all times to do math problems.

Most school districts make important teaching-method or curriculum decisions in secret, without parents’ knowledge or approval. A parent’s only recourse is to complain to principals or school authorities after these authorities have dictated their curriculum or teaching methods, and parent sees damage to their children. Unfortunately, such complaints are often futile.