My brother and I were home educated from end of primary up to 18 years old or so. My brother totally believes in home education, and (not but!) is now a primary school teacher, after having gone on to do his degree and masters in universities in the UK.

We found European home educators are often much more "anarchist" in the sense of this article, liberal, free-thinking, non-conforming, often of non-traditional religion / spirituality, who think the state system is too narrow, limited, and structured. In the States it's much more right-wing religious exclusionists who think the system is too liberal, unstructured, and ungodly. A very very weird difference of culture.

My mum wrote a lot about home education, here's her site with all kinds of info about getting started, details about what we did, etc: http://home-ed.info/

I loved it, and it was perfect for me. My brother loves regime and structure, so would probably have done fine in school. I'm much less academic, and do a whole mixture of jobs (acting, teaching, programming, writing, A/V, electronics, etc.) in a non-profit organisation. Almost all stuff that I learned as a kid, with the oceans of free time that I had, and my friends in school didn't. I worked in a theatre company for 3 years, and did school-work in the evenings, or when I had time. I taught myself to code.

With our kids now, my wife (non-home-educated) is a bit skeptical of her ability to home-school. Our son is still too young (he's one). I certainly wouldn't object to him going to school - providing it doesn't interfere with his education too much. :-)