When a social failure happens at a public school - a child fails a class, drugs are found, a teenager gets pregnant, there’s a fight - most people don't question the public school system itself. But when a social failure happens to a homeschooler, we wonder if the system of _homeschooling_ is broken.

In reality, stories of homeschooling failure are probably no more common than stories of failure in public high school, they're simply more attention-grabbing.

The problem is that homeschooling is extremely bimodal (and the split at least used to be pretty even). It tends to be either very good or very bad.

In particular, the "unschooling" approach (not always named such) is almost universally terrible.

But most of the homeschooled kids I know now are in healthy co-ops with defined curricula and socialization.

The adults I know who are most against homeschooling today are the ones who were homeschooled themselves. Maybe it's just a pendulum.

I think this is likely because people (accurately, in my opinion) attribute behavioral problems with kids to the level and quality of involvement of the parents at home, so it would be bizarre to attribute a child getting caught with drugs at school to the public school system itself.