I'm not trying to be goady, just trying to understand how people get qualified to do this...I have several degrees under my belt, ESL teaching experience, accounting and finance career behind me and still don' t feel I could confidently deliver a high school syllabus load of work to my kids effectively - especially since most high school teachers specialize in subjects, so i wouldn't expect a high school maths teacher to take on the english class etc.
I really struggle to understand this argument. You went to school and learned that same curriculum. Yet you don't think that you understand what you learned well enough to pass that knowledge on to your children? Passing our knowledge onto our children is one of our basic evolutionary functions. If you feel you can't do that with the same syllabus you spent years learning, then that speaks very badly for the syllabus and method of learning that so many of us spent so many years on.
Tbh, I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to replicate a curriculum. A child's brain doesn't really work in that kind of linear fashion. My 5yo reads at a year 3-4 level but in terms of content, he is as happy reading an In The Night Garden book as he is with The Secret Seven. In terms of maths, he doesn't differentiate between his ability to add/subtract/multiply simple numbers and his enjoyment of measuring angles, calculating the area of an object, his base understanding of Pi or working out how many years have passed since the liberation of Paris or the sinking of the Titanic. In terms of science, he will spend an easy two hours just finding and watching bugs in the garden or doing chemistry experiments as complicated as using gallium and aluminium to release the hydrogen from water in the hopes of collecting it in a balloon so he can compare it to helium in terms of usefulness in floating and flammability. He's also been working on creating static electricity with wet rope with an eventual hope to combine the experiments in a miniature recreation of the Hindenberg disaster. (Though, for obvious reasons, it will probably be a while before we attempt that one.)
His interest in biology has mainly focussed on dinosaur evolution, but he can go through his toy dinosaurs and reptiles, point out many of the physical anachronisms present on so many toys like pteranodon toys usually having long tails like a pterodactyls group reptile. Group them depending on which of the three periods of the mesozoic era they lived in and then use other toys, volcanos, trees, rocks, sand, etc to create the landscape of each era. Then the dinosaur's will time travel to each other's periods (like on Dinosaur Train) or Lex Luthor will time travel back to make the dinosaurs mine Kryptonite. As well as that he's recently started getting very interested in what would be the field of astrobiology, so we investigate newly found planets in their Goldilocks zones and work out what kind life could potentially be present on them. (Tardigrades, it's always tardigrades.)
He has a growing interest in history and politics. Largely focussed on the wars of the early 20th century and the current wars and refugee crises. He's still very little so while he understands that wars are very bad things, I keep the focus on positive events like the 1914 Christmas truce, the Danish evacuation of it's Jewish population and the resettlement of Syrian families and children in Europe. He is technologically fairly adept, and uses early engineering kits to create working circuits, has plans to put together his own computer (just a raspberry pi kit), knows how to find the problem on a damaged motherboard and work out how to fix it (though he's obviously only allowed to watch from a safe distance while I solder) and has a surprisingly comprehensive knowledge of how a combustion engine works.
In any given week the kind of 'work' he does will range from what he might be doing in school with his peers to post-graduate level science and every level in between. He doesn't differentiate between it, any or all of it, it's just what caught his interest in that moment. He also doesn't differentiate between subjects as a game of going through the periodic table to find all the elements with no consecutive vowels (inspired by a question on Pointless) is both chemistry and grammar and can lead us in either direction as follow up work. And lastly none of it is work to him, it's all just a spontaneous follow-up of whatever questions he asks. Most of his time is spent in totally free play, cycling, hanging out in the woods, camping and travelling, etc. He's an extremely physically active child and while he can stay still for hours if he's deeply absorbed, he mostly needs to learn through immersive doing and lots and lot of movement.
School wouldn't suit him for one moment. He'd be bored and frustrated and deeply unsatisfied with a way of learning that just skims the surface of a subject compared to how his mind yearns to know and do. As for me, I don't find it hard work at all. Tbh, I find it an utter privilege and an amazing opportunity to learn along with him. So much of what we do as "schooling," starts with him sharing his knowledge of something I've never even heard of with me (gallium) and then we both dive deeper with it. It is actually a stunningly fantastic way to live and I wake up every morning wondering what great new stuff I'll learn today. And yet, I know that a lot of people look at me as the weirdo mother who is damaging my kid. That's life when you take such an unusual step outside of the norm and as much as I believe that my son is living a life much more suited to him, at times that kind of criticism gets into your head and makes you doubt what you are doing. It's a normal human reaction to feel defensive when judged like that and focussing on all reasons why this is the superior choice for your family can be a necessary coping strategy.
I do worry about socialisation, especially with an only child, so work extremely hard to ensure he has lots of interaction with his peers. He has plenty of interaction with homeschooled kids every week, he's now old enough to join a number of local sports teams so he has ongoing community interaction with the schooled kids who live near us and we're in a camping club that we go away with on a lot of summer weekends, so he has friendships with the same group of kids from all around the surrounding counties. The camping club is especially fantastic as on an enclosed campsite the kids get to 'play out' and go off and have their own adult-free adventures from a young age, in the way that kids rarely get these days but were the norm for my generation. But I know that there will be times in the future that he is treated like the 'weirdo homeschooled kid' and that's an awful feeling.