As I've homeschooled, I've focused on the process of learning more than the actual material learned. I expected my children to be able to read, write, and calculate, but beyond that, I wanted them to know how to learn, and to want to learn. To meet the state requirements, I said, "You have to take history. What do you want to study and how do you want to study it?" They may not have covered everything, but the early days, when they loved everything and I did the teaching showed them what sorts of history or science they love best and that's what they studied. When they were unbalanced, I reminded them that when they went to college and lost this freedom, they might pay the price by having to catch up, but they are in college and consider it worth the sacrafice now to have had all those years to explore ancient history or physics or whatever they loved. We can look up the date of the Civil War in minutes, so why do we need to memorize more than the basic time period. (We don't really want them thinking it happened in the 1600s, but getting the date down to the half century is close enough.)
