My only hesitation with unschooling is for the kids who don't get the strong foundational skills because they are starting adult life with a big deficit. I agree with other posters though this is more an issue of neglect than something specifically about the educational method.
Even if most unschooled kids were interested in history etc., the rest would not be, and the problem would not be discovered without any controls. That's all I'm saying, not really dissing social studies or saying it's taught well across the board.
School systems aren't perfect, but some degree of oversight is a good thing to make sure kids aren't neglected. It's more likely that a neglected kid would be detectable in the school system than under the sole control of the parents. That's really my concern in a nutshell. And even though there are some terrible schools out there still today, when you have more eyes on a kid there's more chance of a problem being detected. That is, a kid in a school system really has to be neglected by the school AND the parents for no one to notice a serious problem.
