My decision to homeschool was due to my own experiences in public school, and the common thread amongst my similarly public schooled friends. We were all smart, socially outcast, and had a terrible time in school. If you're smart and weird school holds you back, limits your exploration of your potential, and retards your social growth by forcing you into age based groups instead of intelligence based groups.
For my kids, they get contact with a more heterogenous group than school would allow. They spend time with kids and adults of a wide age range, and a wide social range. Think hippy live in the woods unschoolers to more academic atheist homeschoolers. They also get much, much more time to be kids. School is around 2 to 3 hours per day for each kid, until they go to community college. Plus no bus, no arbitrary schedule, no homework, no forced nap time, and no bullying.
At 14 or so they go into community college, which is again more heterogenous than either public high school or 4 year college. My son's lab partner was a 50 year old retired fireman from Alaska, and my son learned more than chemistry that semester. Then they go to 4 year college, and learn to be part of their future class of college educated upper middle class folks.
In truth it was about not forcing my kids to endure what I had to endure, what I felt was unjust and cruel. I've seen wonderful outcomes so far, and that wasn't a forgone conclusion. The kids are happy, educated, and ready for the world. I'm happy enough with it to repeat this for the next 4 kids.
This is what I came here to say :) I am taking a different approach with my kids: homeschool, then get them to graduate college at 18. Thus they have the credentials to be 'adult' at the same time as the legal rights of an adult. I think it is very hard to be faster than that, at least in the US.
To the original point, there are often very few rules (it depends on the state or smaller area) about what constitutes 'school'. If you really want to make a difference you could start a private school, and then make real work 100% of your curriculum. Call it work study, internship, vocational study, practicum, whatever. This lets you choose your students, and then give them a chance to live up to their potential. If it works you can make it a franchise.
This is something that I've only needed to do with kids under 2, still in diapers. For older kids we talk.
Alas! I've got 6 kids, youngest is currently 3. We've used many strategies, but this guide would have helped a lot. My experience is that every kid is different, and you need to be flexible instead of assuming that what worked last time will work this time. I would add that locking kids in their room has been critical for us with the most agressively wakey kids. This is done when they sleep in a closet-ish room next to ours so that we hear everything, and with a sleep friendly floor covering in front of the door.
I can relate to so many of your points. I too am getting less sleep, planning a rural well stocked estate, and stopping my 401k contributions.
The point about social connections makes a lot of sense, but that's the hardest one for me. I think it would be best to have connections with people who share my view of the future, and who want to prepare together. I have my large family, but I think it would be best to have a larger community.
Debt is a good issue. I think in most scenarios where a 401k or the stock market lose meaning debt also loses meaning. So it might make sense to take on maximum debt to invest in physical goods, or to enable you to suddenly react to a change that requires a lot of liquid wealth.
Good points. I think of investing in skills, physical survival goods, or a resilient dwelling as possible choices. For climate this might be building an underground house in the north, in an area predicted to be wetter and warmer in the future. Yeah, exponential is what I mean.
Will you contact both accepted and rejected applicants? If so, when?