The Future of Homeschooling by Michael Farris.  Equally as informative and fascinating as Teach Your Own.  The beginning of the book contains several graphs that really spell out how well homeschooled students do compared to public school students.  It's something I was aware of but seeing it was quite invigorating.  One particular graph discusses whether or not home school parent education level has any effect on their children's academic performance.  Research found that there is no substantial effect.  However, for public school students, a parent's education level does affect their children's performance.  That is truly extraordinary!!

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There is little question that home schooled children are doing very well indeed compared to their public school counterparts.  But, as parents, we should not be satisfied with doing better than a system that, on average, has totally failed to deliver quality academics in a safe atmosphere.  We want our children to achieve both academically and morally at the highest levels rather than merely being better than the competition. 

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Dorothy Sayers~ "For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves, and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain."

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Some may be concerned about the emphasis on memorizing a great many facts during the grammar stage.  But children need to memorize the basic facts of grammar, history, geography, art, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division simply because they are the necessary tools for further learning.  Dorothy Sayers defends memorization during the grammar period by saying:  "Anything and everything which can be usefully committed to memory should be memorized at this period, whether it is immediately intelligible or not.  The modern tendency is to try and force rational explanations on a child's mind at too early an age.  Intelligent questions, spontaneously asked, should of course, receive an immediate and rational answer; but it is a great mistake to suppose that a child cannot readily enjoy and remember things that are beyond his power to analyze."