Kristen gets it, mostly.

Kristen said:

Too many people look down on homeschooling and homeschooled children. I think it could stem from some people's bias that home schooling is not quite as "good" as other forms of education.

Granted, I can see where some parents can go very wrong with the schooling, but, from my experience, it's been a positive thing.

One of my professors at WFU homeschools his children. He also directs the "home school band", and he encourages his children to take part in many "extracurricular" activities that are available. His children are some of the most well-behaved, intelligent little people I've EVER met.

Absolutely.

However:

And, while I disagree that public education is meant to indoctrinate children into socialism, I do believe that education, in general, can be made into a better institution.

This is the mistake so many Americans make on the subject of government-run schools. On the one hand, they want to see education as an institution and on the other, they deny that public education, as an institution, is purely a Marxist construct. The San Gabriel Valley Tribune printed the following in 2000:

Establishment bellows to the contrary, as one can see by the aforementioned quotation [Plank 10 of the "Communist Manifesto"], government education is not uniquely American. More importantly, it is the most historically efficient method of indoctrinating children; and the educational method of choice for despots Hitler, Stalin and Mao who, like contemporary educrats, were not school choice advocates.

Karl Marx wrote:

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not intended the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.

Here Marx seeks to destroy the concept of parental responsibility in their childrens' education by inciting class hatred. He offers the strawman argument that familial ties are meaningless because the bourgeois use the children of the proletariat as commodity labor. He makes the assertion that all education is social and that "the Communists" merely seek to change that societal influence over education. In the tenth plank of his Manifesto, "Free education for all children in public schools" and "Combination of education with industrial production," he demonstrates that the influence they seek to exert is the social institutionalization of education.

Bukharin then ties the entire concept up neatly in The ABC of Communism:

The task of the new communist schools is to impose upon bourgeois and petty-bourgeois children a proletarian mentality. In the realm of the mind, in the psychological sphere, the communist school must effect the same revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois society, must effect the same expropriation, that the Soviet Power has effected in the economic sphere by the nationalization of the means of production.

And this from Bukharin should be chillingly familiar to anyone who has heard even a little bit of the propaganda output of the American educrat institution:

When parents say, 'My daughter', 'My son', the words do not simply imply the existence of a parental relationship, they also give expression to the parents' view that they have a right to educate their own children. From the socialist outlook, no such right exists. The individual human being does not belong to himself, but to society, to the human race. The individual can only live and thrive owing to the existence of society. The child, therefore, belongs to the society in which it lives, and thanks to which it came into being - and this society is something wider than the 'society' of its own parents. To society, likewise, belongs the primary and basic right of educating children. From this point of view, the parents' claim to bring up their own children and thereby to impress upon the children's psychology their own limitations, must not merely be rejected, but must be absolutely laughed out of court. Society may entrust the education of children to the parents; but it may refuse to do anything of the kind; and there is all the more reason why society should refuse to entrust education to the parents, seeing that the faculty of educating children is far more rarely encountered than the faculty of begetting them. Of one hundred mothers, we shall perhaps find one or two who are competent educators. The future belongs to social education. Social education will make it possible for socialist society to train the coming generation most successfully, at lowest cost, and with the least expenditure of energy.

The reason home schooling, and to some extent private schooling, works so well is that it treats education as a process or an activity rather than an institution. The exact reasons that Kristen gives for homeschooling her children are all excellent arguments against the institutionalization of education.

In any case, bravo to Kristen for even entertaining the idea of homeschooling her children. Whether she realizes it or not, she is acting as a bulwark of freedom and my hat is off to her.