home schooling?

In todays world with the multitude of offerings (both free and premium) there is the increased debate on the merits of home schooling. On the face of it in a simplistic manner the answer is why not? - after all formal schooling as a method of imparting knowledge is a recent phenomena. The earlier method wherein the child was apprenticed to the father and hence learnt his trade didnt have any formal schooling in it. Of course it also meant that there were limited children for this to succeed and with the failure of the limited children per couple the need for "formal education" took shape.

Also the break down of the ruling elite to a democracy has meant that the children of the ruling class had to "learn" as they no longer had a guaranteed "job" (of course the public in countries where there are democratic dynasties would disagree). It is this need to learn new skills other than what their parent knew that has led to this system of formal education. The cost of this education and also the lack of specialised knowledge (as apposed to apprenticeship) in what they learn has meant that we have a lot of average and below average people competing for a broad spectrum of jobs resulting in the search for the one person who is as interested in the job as he would have been in his traditional one.

this break down of traditional jobs has led to a complete loss of excellance in many fields of human endeavour. just image the costs saved by society if there were a family tradition!! of course the job of the government would then just be to manage the "perceived low end job" or in other words that caste and creed do not rear its ugly head. even in the present system we have a caste system - those who have an ivy league education in their respective countries look down upon the rest of the educated lot!! a pro degree takes you longer than others and so on.

so is the current costly system of imparting formal education the way or ??....