5) The vast majority of homeschooling parents--even unschooling parents!--do not neglect their kids. That's discriminatory nastiness. Different is not automatically wrong, and 99%+ of parents want their kids to be educated. Really educated. Those parents work to be sure that their kids are educated, regardless of how they do that work.
I really wish I believed this to be true, but having homeschooled K-12 unfortunately I have seen that this is not always the case. I've known far too many middle and high school age kids who are not just a little bit underprepared but radically underprepared.
These are not the children of mean child abusers. They are nice people who have wonderful qualities and they are people that for the most part I would trust to babysit. They just have a very different idea of the importance of academics for adult life. I don't believe there is a real fix for this problem as there is no evidence that any type of government regulation does anything to improve homeschooling.
I think it is okay for homeschoolers and unschoolers to acknowledge that there are cases where kids maybe are not well served and there are families who really shouldn't have their kids at home. This is very much on topic for a gifted discussion list because one of the greatest challenges for some homeschooling families is finding intellectual peers for their kids. In my community gifted academically minded homeschoolers will really struggle to find kids to engage with academically. For some kids this matters not at all, but for some it is real frustration.
