Thank you for providing such a great ansswer, trynity7. I sent you an email, but I wanted to publicly acknowledge that you have given me a lot to think about. Like I said, I was coming at the subject from a place of ignorance; I was not attempting to judge the system.

As I mentioned in my message, I still have one complaint, which I will repeat here. I was not clear enough in one of my points and you misunderstood me as a result. In case others came away with the same misunderstanding, I wanted to address my biggest concern. I don't think you understood my objection to one of the textbooks that they were using, a history text written from "a Christian perspective." Now, I firmly believe that all students should exercise their own critical judgment as they interpret history. I always tell my own students (I am a graduate student teaching assistant at a university while I am working on my PhD in American history) that there are no "right" or "wrong" answers in American history, though historical evidence suggests that some theories and interpretations are much better than others. I don't mind that some home schooling parents want to give their children a Christian education, but it does concern me that they sometimes choose texts that mainstream professional historians would likely consider out of step with conventional historical scholarship. That is why I suggested that they supplement that text with an additional textbook. People could certainly argue about the politics of history and various textbooks and I can see how some parents might consider certain textbooks to have their own "agenda" (for lack of a better word). I do not want to indoctrinate children with my interpretation of history, but at the same time I want them to be exposed to the broadest possible array of interpretations to assist them in making their own judgments about history. I imagine that the history taught in the textbook used by the Reimers is from the Whiggish school of history, a way of examining the past that was prevalent in the 1950s. History has advanced in many ways since then, going through several schools with each decade marked by a distinct way that professional historians look at and teach history. Just as children need to be taught about the lastest advances in science, I also believe that they should be exposed to the most recent advances in history and the way that Americans talk about their own past. Like I said, I don't object to the Reimers or other parents using that particular text, but I think that if they want to be more responsible educators that they need to provide an alternate text as a supplement.

Again, thanks for giving me so much to think about!