Is "Public" Education Always Bad?

I frequently read arguments by homeschoolers that the education of children belongs to parents because God delegated authority to parents and therefore it is solely the responsibility of parents to do all the schooling. I read such an article today and it prompted me to ask the following questions:

1. Are parents ever allowed to delegate tasks and still be doing their job of seeing their children are educated?

2. Is the only godly way to educate children in the home, or are parents allowed to form cooperatives or hire tutors who take direction from them and are accountable to them for what is taught?

3. I wonder if the problem is not so much one of jurisdiction (though I do not for a moment believe that the state/federal/provincial governments have not overstepped their bounds and treat parents as providers of room and board for the State's children) as it is one of the schools being run by the prevailing religious establisment in our nations, which is blatantly anti-Christian? IOW, would we be objecting so hard if the established religion of the land was the reformed faith and our children were being taught all the subjects under the sun from this perspective? Is it the institution itself we object to or the establishment that runs it?

4. Were our fore-fathers and mothers in the Faith all sinning when they sent their children to schools that were based on the presupposition that the Christian faith was true?

5. I also have in mind the Reformers like Knox and Andrew Melville who did much to institute and reform the schools and universities and thereby paved the way for their nation to become literate in a much more efficient fashion, thereby spreading the effects of Reformation quickly. Was this inherently sinful on their part?

I pose these questions because for a long time I gave the very knee-jerk response that I see a lot of others in the Christian homeschool movement give -- that truly godly parents homeschool and that this is always and forever the only godly thing to do. Anything less than homeschool is a dereliction of duty by these parents. I also believed that "public" education *as an institution* was from the pit of hell. I now question that belief.

I should say that I am familiar with Martin Luther's comment on schools. This strikes me as falling into the category of being an argument from abuse. Schools *might* and have fallen into apostacy. But we might as well argue against the institution of marriage because some men might beat their wives. If you eliminate marriage, no wives are beaten. Eliminate schools and no children are corrupted.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, my children are not in public school and I have no intentions of putting them there. (I have been homeschooling for about 21 years now.) I guess where I am coming from with all this is that, optimistic historicistic postmillenialist that I am, I forsee a time when not only our civil magistrates kiss the Son, but also our other institutions will do so. In that case, I don't know that I would have a lot of objections to parents choosing to send their children to a school.