Bit More Backstory:

My essay has almost 6,000 votes and I am awed and flabbergasted.
 I never expected that many people to know, or care, or want to help a stranger.

My past is a hard onion to unpeel. 
I was never outright denied and education, and I was never told I could never attend college.
But imagine being told day after day about how terrible public school is, and horror stories from your mother about her drunk and horny history teacher?  How would you feel about going to school then?
Or imagine reading multiple 'horror stories' about godly young people who were pulled astray while at secular and even some more liberal Christian Colleges?  (and my parents would also call that an oxymoron)

Imagine Mother Gothel's overly syrupy tone 'encouraging you' to always take a separate path from the world?  Telling you that you dont need a "scrap of paper" to tell people you are intelligent, well read, and have knowledge?

Yeah, that is the line I had to commit to memory.  "College is REALLY expensive.  And then, after spending around a quarter of a million dollars (yeah, that was the estimate I was told most often) and four to six years in a building, you get a piece of paper that tells the rest of the world you know something and can be hired."
(add a part about 4-year degrees taking about 5 or 6 years to complete being the average due to changing of majors, laziness in taking classes & failing, etc if you want to...)
"Why would you EVER want to do that?  I can go out there and buy any book I want. I can even get most of them from the Library.  Do I want to be a Botanist?  Get books out of the library and memorize plant's latin names.  Then plant and run a garden for a couple years.  Do I want to know everything about the Revolutionary War?  Again, read all the books you can find.  Go and visit key battlegrounds and cities where events took place.  By all means, learn and study and get and education!  But NOT at a college.  We can render them obsolete."
And this last one was a nice bundle of issues: "Fine, if you want a college degree, you can get an English degree at the local community college.  CLEP out of as much as you can, and only go in for one or two semesters (CollegePlus was always suggested).  Then, when the government takes away our right to homeschool you can file as a teacher and have your own school with your kids in it, and any unfortunate other homeschoolers who did not prepare their daughters in this way."


Now, one thing I can claim is that I did have an exemplary homeschooled education.  My mother had a college degree and she spent long hours making lesson plans and working out classes for us.  We were required to have 80% mastery of anything we were tested on.  If you did not, you would go back and study, do full corrections until you got everything right, and then re-take the test.
This applied for Math, the sciences, any written or oral tests she made up for history, and any English tests we came upon.  We did Saxon Math, so it was fairly easy to grade those by percent and have us re-do lessons.  Failing a test meant going back over all the practice of the lessons the test covered and re-taking the test.  In Wile Science, we re-did modules and the Quarterlies (I failed Chemistry a couple times) were made to re-do all the modules double-time.  (because we should have most of the information memorized)
I didnt fail much in English, but the essays were not given a percent.  Unless they had so much red that it was hard to see the essay, we didnt re-write those very much.
I loved reading and did a lot of that once I hit puberty and became embarrassed about my size.  Sitting on the couch curled up was a safe place for me where no one could see my hairy underarms (I wasnt allowed to shave for a while) or tease me for my curves.
I am a fast learner, my family calling me the one with the "mind like a steel trap."  I love History and I do well in English and writing. 

My younger siblings are not receiving the education I did, because there are more little kids to care for, because we older siblings arent around to take care of a lot of the house duties and because my mother is much older and much more worn down than she was teaching the 'first round.'
  Also, I am seeing significant (sometimes purposeful) gaps in her current methods of teaching now that I am out in the world and finding out how reality differs from the family bubble...

To Be Continued.....