I was homeschooled. I have pretty mixed feelings on whether this was a good thing or not. Kawoomba asked, so here:

Pros:

• No bullies

• Teaches you how to teach yourself

• No PE/sports

• Go to college early

Cons:

• Go to college early

• Limited contact with others left me pretty socially inept.

• No resources (chemistry experiments, etc)

• After Algebra II, you're on your own.

• With Saxon math books.

• No sense of position among one's peers, no sense of why one might go to college, higher learning, etc. I'm maybe +1 S.D. appearance and +3? S.D. IQ but had no idea until much much later.

• History books tend to be extremely biased (America is a christian nation, gosh darn it) (but my parents somehow mostly avoided this)

• Biology books tend to be completely wrong because you have to lie a lot when you don't believe evolution (I'm still pissed about this)

• Science/astronomy books tend to have wrong sections because you have to lie a lot when you believe the earth is 6000 years old

Of these problems, most of the really bad ones seem easy to prevent if you're aware of them. I expect I could do a really awesome job of homeschooling myself and a really terrible job of homeschooling a more normal person.

I really hated school as a kid. My best guess is that a public school with a good gifted program would have been an improvement, but one without would have been worse than what I experienced.