We homeschool our children and for a year we tried unschooling. My wife's cousins were all unschooled. There is definitely merit to the approach, although done right (unschooling) it can be much harder for the parent than it looks. Done wrong it can set your children up for a fantastic career barely making ends meet. So at it's worse it's no worse than compulsory public education. We're much bigger fans of alt-schooling (or home schooling as it were).

We've settled on a curriculum of the classics and are part of a home schooling group organized around said curriculum. The kids meet weekly and one of the parents facilitates each year, each "grade" level. Even though there is a "tutor" (facilitator) it requires significant parental involvement.

The most unsettling aspect to alt-schooling in general are the ridiculous things that people say to you. It's not that people are stupid, it's that there is so much they know that just isn't so. It is utterly fruitless to debate the benefits of alt-schooling with people who have not been outside the box. You cannot know how rich, valuable, and academically positive alt-schooling is on average. So you ask questions like, "what about socialization" as if it's a good thing to be in an asylum run by the inmates, or "what about college" as if Harvard doesn't want someone who studied latin from age 7. I digress.

To be fair I feel the need to share my background. I'm a high-school dropout. I subsequently aced the GED, along with the others who took the test with me. I did high school at a "blue ribbon" public school. Everything before that was at a small church-supported private school. We were by no means wealthy, and tuition was as cheap as it could have possibly been. Still my parents both had to work so that we could go. In the private school we did Algebra in the sixth grade, I read at a post-high school reading level in the third grade. It was intellectually stimulating and a wonderful nurturing environment. When I got to public school I found a prison for the mind. The teachers, while seemingly more educated seemed either not to care or to be overwhelmed with things other than teaching. The latter must have been as soul crushing for them as corporate work. It was soul crushing for me to be there. At first I began to advance ahead of my peers. I started taking advanced classes and realized that they were just more of the same mediocrity. At 16 I got a job programming and at 17 I dropped out. The rest, as they say, is history. I now manage a team of over a hundred programmers. I have a passionate hatred of the public education system. I didn't wind up digging ditches and I believe that it is 100% because of my early education experience in that humble little school that was not unlike a homeschool club.

I'm not debating the merits of your public education experience. I'm not saying you wasted your time or didn't come out ok. I'm not saying you aren't a good person or your teachers weren't either. I'm saying it can be better and it's amazing how little effort it can require. Life will not fall apart if you don't take AP Math and join the Key Club.

We've all been told the same lie, work hard in school so you can get good grades so you can go to a good college so you can get a good job so you can work hard so you can become CEO. Alt-schooling can instead prepare one well for the world where "humans need not apply".