"These children would be better served learning, and having it drilled in, how to balance a checkbook."

Of course, education should definitely cover GAAP early on. Applied maths are much easier for kids to learn than 'book maths'. I taught my kids math with imperial system tape measures, and it took only minutes for me to explain how to work with unlike denominators because they were all multiples of each other, which makes changing them to like denominators bog simple. Calculus doesn't impinge on the trades much, and I didn't teach them rocket science, but the basics set them on their own way. If they wanted to calculate orbits, they'd know how to find that out.

"Sure we can teach them all to read, but they are not going to read a mortgage contract and comprehend it."

No one's learning how to read anymore in school. Teachers have become saboteurs, trained to kill the irrepressible urge to learn what they need to know kids have.

It's a disgrace. Literacy rates are plummeting across America.

"...the burning desire for working/studying in a certain area is far more important."

Kids have this. That's why a 2 year old will ask you why repeatedly for hours until you despair. The thing that makes home schooling so easy is all you have to really do to 'teach' your kids is learn what they want to know, and point them to where they can find out. It helps a lot if you don't park them in front of mind destroying screens first. Social media is a ruse to disintegrate society. Don't feed your kids to it. If you don't, they will be literally bursting with curiosity that will compel them to learn to read, to do basic math, and learn the history of whatever it is they are ravenously curious about, because every topic, say masking tape, requires they read about it, basic math always emerges from quantifying the topic (how many feet of tape are on a roll, for example), and someone invented it at some prior point in time, even masking tape.

Ok, ok. I know you're dying to know, and it was Richard Drew who invented masking tape back in 1930.

IMG source - Smithsonianmag.com

Anyway, whatever topic kids want to know more about will teach them the three R's along the way, if you are the least bit clever. The best way to learn about something is to teach it to someone else, so asking your kids to write a one page report that explains masking tape will enable you to introduce writing (and teach you all kinds of amazing things about that fascinating artifact of the 20th Century you never knew), and then you can show them how to write letters to people in the masking tape industry, which is a good practical skill, probably the penultimate writing need most people will ever have.

Homeschooling is the way to go, because your kids will learn just the things they are most interested in from the people they love the most in the world (you, their parents) and they will also become accustomed to teaching themselves, and learn their limits. Then no one has to pigeon hole them into this or that career track, because they will take that upon themselves, as should be.

Thanks!