If he only goes on learning how to go to school, when he is finished he will be entrapped in that system, and be as useful as teats on a boar hog, probably for the rest of his life.
Homeschoolers tend to think for themselves. Their minds have not been programmed by the public school system. He will do fine just as my kids have without military service either, as he already knows how to educate himself.
Yes, there is learning how to tell profs what they want to hear for those courses for which it is necessary, but he will not necessarily be incapable of responding *properly* to authority without military service and I have no doubt that he will NOT be trapped by *the system*.
That is not a bad start, if done right, but there is a lot of variation in homeschooling as well. I assume that you do not personally have direct experience with the benefits of facing the military service realities of being deprived of the home coddling environment. Like when you meet your first DI who is trying to help you learn to kill while staying alive. You don't begin to acquire that kind of needed toughness in home or public schooling, or college.
From my standpoint:
o I raised 4 children alone as a divorced man.
o I have 2 sons and 1 daughter with 19 grandchildren.
o I have observed their various experiences.
o Of these, one son has 10 children, well home-schooled.
o Yet under the best conditions, the lack of learning acclimation to external authority is deficient without further non-home training.
o Even with a full scholarship to Syracuse, I essentially flunked out through lack of maturity that the Army and the exigencies of marriage finally brought me.
o I went back later, and then was on the Dean's list every semester in engineering.
o I have seen literally hundreds and hundreds of foolish children who have irreversibly damaged their own futures by going off to university too early, while at the same time compromising or wrecking their own parents' financial and personal lives.
I could go on and on, but it's not something I will argue about. What I said stands, and is practical, recapitulating observations and personal experience over many years. I will not back off that stance. I have made my own mistakes.
Your thoughts are precious to you, but your theories are not very helpful to the late teenager or as-yet unfinished parent (this is what a grandparent is for). Spending 2 or so formative years under the personal attention and discipline of a demanding and regulated life outside the home before college will bring benefits one can not get under Mom and Dad's permissive and protective tolerance.
Unless you have this experience personally, let me suggest you temper your own opinions until they are thoroughly time-tested.
These kids have to have the protective wraps off and stand on their own in the school of hard knocks. Early. Extending their childhood by buying them an education they haven't yet earned will not do that. Not until, that is, that they have carried the obscene servitude to their school loan finally paid off, years later.
Ask the veterans that came back from WWII and Korea who entered college with firm determination to treat it very seriously, and built the nation that their children are squandering away.
With all due respect.