I honestly think that if you have intelligent, well-educated parents (like mine) to guide you, you could replace public school almost entirely with television.
Public education kinda sucks. They might tell you some vague outline of the Revolutionary War, like mentioning George Washington and Ben Franklin and Paul Revere, and something about "taxation without representation", whatever that means. What they don't tell you is all the stuff behind it, like the French philosophers and other social commentators who inspired the Founding Fathers, the intense excitement of the violent bloody battles, Ben Franklin's revolutions in newspapers, the idealism, the internal debates, the way King George III went insane.
They might mention how ancient Egypt had mummies and pyramids, and some gods like Anubis and Ra, but never mention the complex mythology, the way every pharaoh tried to gaslight the populace into thinking his version of religion was the correct one, and radicals like Akhenaten and Hatshepsut.
You could learn more about history from PBS and YouTube documentaries than you could in elementary and middle school. I learned more about science from Bill Nye the Science Guy than at a class. I've learned more about practical math from Cyberchase than I ever did in school.
The trick, of course, is to fact-check stuff you watch, especially on YouTube. If you use Wikipedia, check the citations and see if they're a reliable source.
It actually makes me worry about teachers' jobs, especially when it comes to music. I've learned more about music theory and playing guitar from YouTube than I ever did in the approx. 5 years I took guitar classes- although admittedly I wasn't very ambituous back then.
