Definitely.
Absolutely not. Even in America I wouldn't consider it the best decision for ALL parents.
Absolutely. School boards are elected officials and school boards routinely have public meetings to determine the curriculum. Additionally, some parents are very vocal in what their kids should be taught (as they should be). Unfortunately, these "recommendations" are adopted without regard to the children's broader educational needs.

Some of these whiners have effectively eliminated the teaching of evolution, classic works in literature, and geological history. Not to mention personal responsibility.

To be fair, many homeschoolers cite the existence of these disciplines in the curriculum as their reason for homeshooling.
It's pretty close to that. Sex education is a hot issue. Many school systems won't even allow the discussion of contraceptives. Drugs get the same attention; we're still living in the Barbara Bush era of "Just Say No".
Adolescence is a difficult and confusing time. Information from your well-meaning parents and your uninformed friends gets pooled into an amalgam of conflicting data that ends up causing more confusion.
It's more common sense than research, but perhaps a few names off the top of my head will help you understand where I'm coming from:
Grover Cleveland, James Garfield, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Eli Whitney, Michael Faraday, William Lear, John James Audubon, Wilbur and Orville Wright, John Moses, Peter Cooper, Oliver Heaviside, Elias Howe, Cyrus McCormick, Guglielmo Marconi, Sir Frank Whittle, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington Carver, Robert Frost, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Willa Cather, Agatha Christie, William Buckley Jr, Margaret Atwood, Noel Coward, Alex Haley, Sean O'Casey, Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louis Armstrong, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Yehudi Menuhin, Irving Berlin, William Blake, Leonardo Da Vinci, Claude Monet, Andrew Wyeth, Ansel Adams, Frank Loyd Wright, George Patton, John Paul Jones, General Douglas MacArthur, John Barry, Matthew Perry, John Pershing, David Dixon, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, Benjamin Franklin, David Crockett, Thomas Paine, William Jennings, Henry Clay, Alexander Hamilton, Sam Houston, Charles Evan Hughes, Susan B. Anthony, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Mary Wallker, Mary D. Leakey, Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Blackwell, Jill Ker Conway, Gloria Steinem, Frances E. C. Willard, Sandra Day O'conner.

That's just in the last few centuries. We could go further back and talk about Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, etc. The point is, "homeschooling" used to be the norm. Public education is the "new" thing that, as yet, hasn't really proven to be more effective than the original.
Your operating on a myth that I tried to dispel above. Homeschool children do not live in a bubble. In fact, they have a great many more opportunities for education than public school children. For example: one woman I know will be sending her 11 year-old to courses at a local community college next year; our science classes are supplemented with not just everything you would do in a normal science classroom but with lectures and workshops at the museum and local university (Big 10); they have activities and sports groups - if they want to join the neighborhood school's various sports teams or various musical/drama/whatever groups they are free to do that (my kids aren't old enough yet).

Most people have this impression that homeschooled children sit in a lit room with no windows and study all day by themselves. This simply isn't true for the vast majority of homeschooled kids. Lit rooms with no windows are in public schools.
I agree that kids need to make mistakes. But I don't want one mistake to be their last. You should take a walk down the hallway of a typical American public school. Then decide if that's the best place to learn social skills.

By nature, children have a need to imitate and to identify with others. When a child is put into an age-segregated classroom, he begins to develop identity based on the feedback from the group of peers he's been placed with. He is constantly getting feedback about his appearance, behavior and values and is strongly influenced to adopt the beliefs and behaviors of the peer group. Children who don't "fit in" are likely to be ridiculed, ostracized or worse. People become like whom they are around - and the pressure to conform is intense. The sense of identity these groups provide can be so strong that the child may be forced to choose between the values of the group and your values - all in the name of "positive socialization".

When children spend time with their parents in a nurturing, accepting environment, they usually learn to enjoy being with all age groups, including their own. As children are allowed to associate closely with their parents in daily routines of work, play, rest, and conversation, they learn to share responsibility and to feel that they are an integral part of the family team. They feel a sense of self-worth, of being needed, wanted, and depended upon. By watching and imitating others, children learn politeness and to express themselves confidently with good conversational skills. Before the child is forced to deal with the effects of peer pressure, he is able to develop confidence and independence in his thinking and values. This leads to children who are both productive and self-directed in their activities.

In a blind study of both homeschooled and public schooled children (Self-Confidence in Home-Schooling Children - John Wesley Taylor, Ph.D.) homeschooled children scored significantly higher on the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale (a widely accepted measure of self-esteem) than did their public schooled counterparts. Larry Edward Shyers, Ph.D., reported in his 1992 dissertation, Comparison of Social Adjustment Between Home and Traditionally Schooled Students, that homeschooled children display fewer problem behaviors than their public schooled counterparts when playing with mixed groups of children from both educational backgrounds. Other researchers concur with these conclusions. Among them are M.M. Delahooke, in a 1986 doctoral dissertation, Home educated children's social/emotional adjustment and academic achievement: a comparative study and L. Montgomery, in the study,The effect of home schooling on the leadership skills of home schooled students.
I don't say that public schools are cruel, I loved school. But it's not the best place to learn.
I'm glad you were educated somewhere else, but the fact is that American schools are prisons, some even have gates, guards, and metal detectors.
I say again, you create the dress code. If you want your kid to do his school work in a coat and tie, make him wear a coat and tie. Once you send your child to public school, his dress code will be dictated by the latest MTV video.

Also, nobody homeschools through college. Do you believe homeschool children will continue to believe they can wear pajamas anywhere they want? The business community is starting to take note of the decline in the quality of high-school and college graduates. Not just their poor reading, writing, and speaking skills but also their apparent lack of interest in their own hygiene.
And everyone is off at the same time. Florida in the summer is brutal, and even more so when you're standing in line with 1,500 other sweating, whining, fat, rude, obnoxious people whose (largely public schooled) kids are demanding this or that, and their overworked, overstressed parents are caving in just to get the spoiled brats off their backs.
I say "according to them" because the study was not an observational study but a questionnaire. I could have just as rightly said, "according to public schooled children, they are not as civicly minded and happy in their relationships". Here's the study I'm quoting: http://www.nheri.org/modules.php?nam...howpage&pid=27

You don't have to buy the report to see the findings. Here are some excerpts:
- 76 percent of homeschool graduates aged 18 to 24 voted in the last 5 years, compared to only 29 percent of the U.S population in that bracket in older age brackets the percentage of voters is 95 percent or higher for the homeschoolers, compared to 53 percent for the relevant U.S. populace
-71 percent of the homeschool graduates participate in ongoing community service activities compared to 37 percent of U.S. adults
- 88 percent of the homeschoolers were members of community groups, churches or synagogues, unions, or professional organizations compared to 50 percent of U.S. adults
- Taking all things into consideration, 59% of the subjects reported that they were “very happy” with life, while 27.6% of the general U.S. population is “very happy” with life.
Well, first of all, it doesn't take all that much to become a public school teacher. Most get their degrees in 2 years. There is little requirement for maintaining your education in your particular field and there is little to no accountability for being able to actually teach what you know.

To answer your question, you do not need to know everything that 20 teachers would know. If there's a subject you don't feel comfortable teaching you could:
- Send you child to a specialist who teaches this subject. If he wants to learn about quantum math, you send him to the best quantum math guy you can find.
- Find a homeschool teacher in your group who knows a lot about the subject and organize a trade - you teach their kids something you know a lot about and they teach your kids quantum physics.
- Learn along with your kid. My kids and I are doing this for German, we're both learning together. (They're 6 and 7, BTW - six years younger than they would be before the state believes they're old enough to learn another language).

Look, I'm not saying this is a Panacea. In fact, I've stated just the opposite. However, arguments against homeschooling rested first upon the question of whether a homeschooled child would get as good an education as a public school child. That myth has been proved wrong time and again as homeschooled children continue to outperform their public school counterparts on standardized tests.

The next attack was made on this theory of "socialization". This too has be laid to rest with studies that only recently have come to fruition (due to the long time necessary to see the effects).

Now, is it because the parents of children who have a predilection toward a homeschool environment are more likely to be homeschooled? I don't know. I do know that it works for me. Academically, my children are 2 and 3 years ahead of where they would be in public school. Socially, they are as comfortable around adults as they are around other children. They are responsible, caring, happy individuals who understand far more of their world and its inhabitants than many adults.

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In this country, we don't need reasons to make things legal; we need reasons to make things illegal. - Startup