My husband has been a teacher for years and years, though for high school aged kids. He is coming at me with that sort of background, so I get a lot of the stereotyped arguments. He also enjoyed his years of school. I however did not fit in socially throughout school and was not challenged. I ended up at the top of my class, but I was lazy and it didn't take much effort. I ended up having to find things on my own outside of school to learn more. I don't want that for my kids.
However, right now they are currently in a smaller, more rural school. They have a small class size and do a lot of hands on activities. They are using Saxon math for now, but I have heard it will be dropped when the state switches to Common Core standards. It's not ideal, but they don't seem to have many of the peer problems I see in the bigger cities. It would be an entirely new ball game for high school though.
I have always done spontaneous teaching lessons for my kids in my favorite areas- art, life and physical sciences, and history. As I learned and talked to homeschooling families in the area, I started actually planning things out and using more materials. I do things on weekends, evenings, days off, and all last summer. My hope is that my husband will see I can handle things and will relent and let me have a test year. I do have a 4 year old that would be going to K next year so maybe.
He gives me the socialization argument and the 'band' argument. I can refute the socialization one, but he is right in that we wouldn't be able to financially provide music lessons to the kids and the schools wouldn't allow partial enrollment here.
Baby steps!