Dear achilles2000,
"When I discovered that teaching children to read using a good phonics curriculum is a relatively trivial exercise and my children began reading everything, I began to wonder that myself."
Part of what turned us off from school is that our older son was in Kindergarten, an allegedly good Catholic school, and the teachers were actually discouraging him from figuring out the reading thing. He was getting too far ahead, and they were unhappy about that.
He sorta half-picked up reading in spite of it all during Kindergarten. We encouraged him at home, but because of the dual-authority thing, "But the teacher doesn't want me..." it was a struggle.
We began homeschooling him the following fall, for 1st grade. Within a week or two, it all clicked in his head and he went from sorta reading not too bad for a first grade to being a real, heavy-duty reader. I'd had a habit of reading to him most every night since he was little. We read "The Hobbit" and the "Lord of the Rings" together. We'd started "The Chronicles of Narnia" at the end of the summer, and we were a little ways in when the school year started.
Once he put it all together, in the first few weeks of 1st grade, he decided that I wasn't reading enough of the "Chronicles" to him every night, and he started reading it on his own. He was done the entire series of books by Christmas.
Humans are built to learn this stuff.
Often, schools do little but interfere, inhibit, and prevent.
Students often succeed in spite of their schools. Especially public schools staffed by NEA shills.
sitetest
I would extend your experience with reading to morals, conservatism, religion.
If you only have a rushed morning shoving your munchkin out the door for school, and then are rushing around after school to extracurricular activies, putting dinner on the table, and dealing with the 4 hours of homework that should never have been sent home in the first place (why can't it get done in the 8 hours you have my kid), you are limited in reinforcing your values in your child.
But, the almighty educators at that school get how many hours a day to influence your child, "mold their minds." On top of that, if your child is sitting in a class room of 30 kids, and stands up for his/her belief in opposition to the other 29 kids... Wow.
Great story - your children are lucky. As for the "NEA shills", as you put it, most teachers today don't shill - they don't understand enough to do it. They actually believe the rubbish that has been pumped into their heads by the NEA and schools of ed. The BU Ed School Dean sums it up nicely:
"Dean Edwin J. Delattre of Boston University School of Education - one of the harshest critics of teacher training - says there are no more than 50 good teacher training institutions among the 1,300 in the country. Of the others, he says: "They admit and graduate students who have low levels of intellectual accomplishment. They are well-intentioned, decent, nice people who by and large don't know what they're doing.""
This is why it is so difficult to reach people working in the public schools with any sort of reasoned argument. There are, of course, geniuses and near geniuses working in the schools, but mostly, and especially among the newer teachers, you are dealing with intellectual cripples. And the administrators are worse - they have lower GRE scores than elementary school teachers. A $600 billion/year institution run by its worst and dumbest, not its best and brightest.
For an interesting article, see http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1999/9905.innerst.method.html