Homeschooling - Controversial?

I'm not really talking about all the religious homeschoolers who tend to practice what we call "school at home" - little desks lined up in a room of the house called a schoolroom, taking attendance, using textbooks and prepackaged curriculum, grades and testing, mom is teacher , dad is principal with ultimate authority. My experience is the opposite aparently of JJV - the media love these kinds of homeschoolers - very non-controversial, except for their propensity to use scientific texts without the benefit of the discussion of evolution, sexuality and all those topics that religious folks don't like to talk about These "homeschools" turn out basically the same product as the public schools.

What I'm talking about is unschooling, which is very controversial, being assailed by all kinds of people, from the media (check out Dr. Phil's recent show on the subject), a big series in some midwestern newspaper, maybe the Plain Dealer, I can't really remember, education experts (the Columbia professor in the recent NYT article), legislators, PTA zealots, as well as teacher's unions, professional educational bureacrats, etc. There is no doubt this kind of homeschooling is controversial - and that is because it is so far out of the box that people are used to education being packaged in.

And, btw, the religious right folks at HSLDA would like to have you believe that homeschooling is their baby alone, but the people that I credit with the concept that I'm practicing are folks writing the in the 60's and 70's like John Holt, A. S. Neill, Patrick Farenga, Ivan Ilich, Raymond and Dorothy Moore, Mark and Helen Hegener, and people thinking about the ideas of free/alternative schools. Religious homeschooling actually started well after the original movement when the tax laws caused many small Christian schools to close. It is true that religious people had a lot to do with legislation making homeschooling legal, but they certainly weren't the only ones, and they tend toward overregulation which I disagree with.

I don't know what the numbers are for unschoolers - no one does, these people often don't report to the government on principal, and states don't keep track of the different kinds of homeschooling happening.

I have also tended to notice in the national media that in cases of child abuse, or a child committing crimes - if that family/child was homeschooled this fact is featured prominently. And in the majority of such cases, where they weren't homeschooled, the fact that they are public schools students is not mentioned or at least not mentioned as a reason why abuse /crime occurs.