For me personally, being homeschooled was excellent and I am thankful that my mother made the sacrifices that she did for my sisters and me.

My perception of regular school is that a pupil's daily schedule as a student is very much dictated and regimented with little freedom for self-direction.

As a homeschooler, this was not so for me. After my mother had taught me to read and write, I had a good deal of freedom to do my work when I wanted to do it as long as it got done. This is very similar to the results-only work environments that work so well in the software industry. I was in such an environment by the time I was 9 or 10 years old.

As for politics, from the time I was 11 or so I was a bit of an A.M. talk radio junky - much to my dad's dislike. I was able to listen to the radio throughout the day while working on my school. This most certainly shaped my verbal debate skills and made the political science classes in college way more fun.

The flexible schedule is also what enabled me to start teaching myself computer programing starting at 14 years. I devoured every computer book that I could find at the county library. I wrote lots of code, including a full invoicing and accounting system for my lawn care business using nothing but QBASIC in DOS 5. By my junior year in high school I was already doing web development for corporate clients and I started a web hosting business before graduating high school. The first contract that I ever signed, on the day after my 18th birthday, was a merchant agreement so that I could accept credit card payments for the business.

My education was not entirely directly from my mother either. The homeschooler community where I grew up was quite strong. There are schools designed around homeschoolers where the student is enrolled for various classes - math, science, classical logic, foreign languages, etc. I took all of these classes. The best part was that I had class all day, but only two days per week. This freedom is what let me market and build the Internet business that I had then.

There are many paths that education can take. My experience was that of being homeschooled within a Christian community and then going on to study computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In my personal experience, the whole homeschool process was a highly effective educational environment. It was not until my freshman year at Georgia Tech that I felt constrained by class schedules and having to show up everyday at certain times. However, I adapted well enough even to that and went on to earn both a bachelor and a master degree.

It worked out wonderfully for me and despite being a less common path, it made all of the difference!