I don't think getting married in the early 20s is inherently doomed or anything - if people find the partner they love and are compatible with at that age, what would be the sense of waiting? I do think there's a problem with just graduated twentysomethings deciding marriage is something they need to check off a list like grocery items though. Despite the stereotype of the woman planning her wedding before meeting the groom, my own best friend was like this, doing the desperate to marry someone, ANYone thing. Every new girlfriend I met was introduced to me as his fiance. (Thankfully, he actually married the right one rather than any of those other fiances...)

I have known of someone who homeschooled a child for what would have been her first year of school because she was pretty mature and had a birthday that would make her start first grade at almost 7.

This is almost extactly our situation with our daughter. Only she would actually be 7 before starting first grade. There is still a chance we might insert her into public school for second grade (the original plan if the school wouldn't put her into first grade this year), but my wife is now talking about doing homeschool indefinitely.

for cookie-dough reasons

Yes, this. Why doesn't she watch Buffy? Oh, yeah - because there are vampires and demons in it and therefore it is evil.

I have nothing to say on the homeschooling front as I have never known anyone who was. Which I suppose says something in itself.

Every new girlfriend I met was introduced to me as his fiance.

I had a college friend like that. After every first date, he'd tell us that they weren't talking about marriage yet.

In a completely unironic way.

Our joke was that he was going for his "Mr." degree.

Matt, Pete, I never knew any boys like that. They were all marriage-scared, I think. Dh and I met at a work Christmas party. We were going out after, so I had him come by to meet my folks, so they'd be able to identify him in a line up, if he turned out to be an axe murderer.

When I went upstairs to change, apparently a slightly tipsy dh, had a nice long ramble with my mother about how he wasn't looking to get married, and had no plans to get married, and wasn't even interested in finding someone to marry.

The thing that always cracked me up was best friend dated women that were like refugees from a sitcom or an Adam Sandler movie. Like, one engagement ended with a restraining order, and another when her friends in school started getting their driver's licenses and suddenly settling down to married life didn't seem as cool.

Curse Canada and its ability to change all the coins in my change purse to its useless-in-American-vending-machines currency!

I was homeschooled for a year (grade 3) because I hated school so much that I was refusing to participate. My attitude was essentially "This is stupid and boring. Why should I do it?" Apparently the almost-daily detentions didn't seem like a convincing reason.

I missed enough that year that grade 4 was kind of interesting, and school improved steadily from then on.

Yes, there's a big difference between wanting to get married because that's the expected "next step" for people your age and getting married because it is natural growth of a specific relationship.

Like Hec, though, I believe in the public schools as a fundamental foundation of a the kind of society we want to have. And I think by starving and denigrating them, we're losing something so so important and I wish I had solutions instead of laments,

That seems articulate enough to me. Mind, I'm familiar with the particular circumstances behind homeschooling for AmyP (for whom it wasn't her first choice, but the best choice under the circumstances) and Lizard. Undoubtedly, everybody has their reasons.

(sidenote: Renoir: "There is only one great tragedy in this world - everybody has their reasons." I remember reading that when I was 12 and not being able to grasp it and still sensing there was something true in it.)

Aside from my faith that high quality public education is and should be the foundation of a democracy, I'm also opposed to home schooling as an example of what I consider Freak Ass Momism. Which is not a label I would apply to any individual (and certainly not anyone here), but the current cultural tendency to weirdly overvalue A Mother's Love and Only I Can Give My Child What It Needs etc. I think we're going through a cultural pendulum swing that's as distorted and out of whack as Victorian and Edwardian parenting was.

Again, I'm as big a fan of dedicated parents as you're going to find. I know what it requires and I appreciate it when I see it. So this isn't a comment on stay at home parenting, or making sacrifices for your children. I lived next door to a family that practiced hardcore attachment parenting and they were fine. I didn't agree with that philosophy, but I'm not talking about one particular approach or the level of devotion.

But there has been a cultural valuation (for a while now - ten to fifteen years or so now?) for one-on-one parenting which does a disservice to the child. I think children thrive with regular varied contact with other adults, teachers, kids of different ages. The vast majority of human culture has encouraged that. I think home schooling deprives children of absolutely necessary social skills, and even survival skills. You don't do them any favors by keeping them focused on a relationship with just one or two parents.