Home schooling is not a criminal activity. Negligence is, under certain circumstance, illegal. If parents neglect giving their children the opportunity to receive an accredited form of education, that is criminal negligence in a similar way to sending them to a voodoo priest instead of a doctor, when they become ill. Does that system work perfectly? Does it account for every individual situation? No, of course not. Still, it's a worthy trade-off in my opinion.

I'd like to point out that many of these "alternative" schools had to be closed down for weeks lately due to measles outbreaks, because the majority of the parents refuse to give their children vaccinations. In a related case, one infant died from contracting it. More extremely, there are cases of parents injecting bleach (a.k.a. "Miracle Mineral Supplement") into their children's butts. At what point do you believe that the state has a right to step in and protect these children from the idiocy of their parents?

> There is no test that can be made to compare different educational systems since neither knowledge nor creativity can be measured.
You can obviously measure the extent of knowledge, the ability to solve logical/math problems and the ability to follow rules/conventions of grammar and orthography. You can question the merit of these tests and what they represent, but you can still measure. Are you the kind of relativist that would argue that a public education involving math, science and foreign language can't be to demonstrated to be better than an education based purely on the content of the bible? That's what most of these home-schooling cases over here are about.

I'm certainly no fan of the school system over here, but I recognize that it provided me with the basic skills to further educate myself. It's also - for better or worse - a basic requirement for employment. Though the system may not be as efficient or productive as it could be, I wouldn't risk putting the responsibility for education entirely into the hands of the parents.

>My guess is that the students who perform best in exams are the most damaged in terms of their ability to think independently.
Your hypothesis may well be true, but the system doesn't force people into performing exceptionally well in exams (most people don't), it rewards them for it. These individuals are likely to just respond well to those rewards and weren't really "free thinkers" to begin with. In my experience, these people are not strong defenders of anything, they are rather adaptive. In that sense, these people aren't "damaged", they just haven't been challenged to think.

>Can you see the paradox in being made to attend an 'anti-authoritarian' institution for years on end until it changes who you are and kind of person you will become?
I see your paradox, but it doesn't serve as a good argument. Everything changes who you are and what kind of person you will become. Home-schooling means you are made to attend the "school" of your parents, it also means you are separated from the majority of your peers for a big part of the day. At a certain age, you are (likely) made to provide for yourself, whether that means taking up a job (rarely possible without a "real" school education), getting money from the government (and following its rules), begging in the streets or collecting berries in the woods.