Almost all of your points boil down to homeschooled children not being convenient for teachers used to children who have been in day school since they were of s

Almost all of your points boil down to homeschooled children not being convenient for teachers used to children who have been in day school since they were of school age. If the only bad result of your reading lots of manuals was poor grades in English for a few years this is of no consequence. Learning to express one’s thoughts about things you care about is a very different skill from imitating research in English literature. If you want to learn more about democratic and child centred education as practiced at Summerhill I can highly recommend the founding Headmaster, A.S. Neill’s book on the school, Summerhill[1]. You are of course free to believe whatever you want about child centred methods of education but Summerhill’s students are not handicapped in life success or exams by the freedom to attend lessons or not as they choose, not are Sudbury’s[2]. You do not need an “impartial assessment” to know how well children are reading if you can read at the level of a university graduate. You can look at the books they read for pleasure and assess the level for yourself. If the child doesn’t quite get it but they’re close enough to try to read those books and enjoy them that’s a good thing. The idea that you should take care not to contradict the curriculum is ... Education is meant to be for children, not teachers. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school