>If you have the resources (time, money, teachers etc.) to get your children the same education they would get in a (german) public school you might as well found a private one.

Unless Germany's public school education somehow doesn't show its results on tests like PISA then this shouldn't be too difficult to provide to one or two kids. More than that would make it way harder. And I'm sure that if you did try to found a private school you'd have to deal with a mile long list of inane regulations as seems standard in all aspects of Germany.

Just an example of the absurd regulations in a different subject: Germany requires a license to stream to more than 500 people and they've actually enforced this on streamers. The license can cost €10k.

> Just an example of the absurd regulations in a different subject: Germany requires a license to stream to more than 500 people and they've actually enforced this on streamers. The license can cost €10k.

This information is outdated and misleading. Since 2020, licenses for public broadcast are only required for broadcasts which, averaged over six months, exceed 20000 viewers and have significant importance for the formation of public and private opinion [1].

Prior to this change, some streamers had indeed been forced to acquire such a license (although there were more conditions than just regularly having 500 viewers). Also, licenses for streamers actually cost around 1000-2500 €, instead of the 10000 € you claimed. In addition, there was an exception for cases where this would be an undue hardship [2]. The regulator basically agreed that this was pretty silly, but that it planned to enforce the law as written (as is its job), until it was changed (which it has been).

[1] (german) § 54 MStV, https://www.gesetze-bayern.de/Content/Document/MStV-54

[2] (german) https://t3n.de/news/livestreams-rundfunklizenz-1175321/

Maybe it's different in the USA, but I feel like public school was a complete waste of my time.. I'd read through the entirety of all the textbooks in the first couple of weeks of the school year and learn everything a kid my age was expected to know. Then I'd sit in class for 5 hours a day for 9 months, reading pulp sci-fi, shuffling a deck of cards, or just moping with my head on my arms. I came out of it with such a bad work ethic that I almost flunked out of college in the first quarter

My cousin is home-schooling her daughters, and they're all years ahead of kids their same age while only needing to study ~9 hours a week. They have two full weekdays devoted to social activities with other homeschooled kids. It looks really amazing IMO

Where I grew up in a liberal big city, the only home-schooled kids I met were super well-educated children of professionals, and were way ahead of both public and private school kids. I was a lot like you - always finished my homework before class was over, read all the materials and was bored in school most of the time. I was jealous of the home-schooled kids. My parents would say, "well but it's good to be around people your own age," but the home-schooled kids had plenty of friends. That gave me the idea that homeschooling was a better way.

That was before I met home-schooled kids from the rest of the country, where it had nothing to do with giving them a better education; it had a lot to do with limiting their education, and forcing them into a fundamentalist Christian or Mormon ideology. Those kids really didn't get out to socialize much, and they didn't get a good education, either.

I think parents have a right to homeschool their kids, and a government ban on that scares me. But I also think the parents need to meet or exceed the qualifications of the teachers who would otherwise be teaching, and [edit][strikethrough]the government[/strikethrough] *society* has some interest in preventing someone from having 48 children and forming a cult.

So like a lot of other stuff extremist wackos do, "this is why we can't have nice things." The goal is to walk a fine line in the center where government can stop crazy people from using freedoms to do crazy things, while still allowing sane people to have the rights and privileges they need as free individuals within the framework of society.

That's a good point, the government has to decide where to draw the line between parents' freedom to educate their kids and kids' freedom to have access to an actual first world education

I think having to pass standardized tests as homeschooled kids makes sense

People who value diversity of thought should support edge cases where everyone doesn’t learn the exact same pedagogy.

Thats what the "freie Trägerschaft" schools are for, public schools can also have supplementary courses. (the latter isn't very common though)

I went to a school that practiced "Montessori pedagogy" and I wish I could have visited a "normal" school in hindsight.

Why would you have preferred that over Montessori?