AMA: I was unschooled for most of my childhood, then voluntarily chose to leave to go to a large public high school.

I absolutely agree. My parents both have graduate degrees, worked part time throughout my childhood, and our family/housing unit was relatively stable. This helped a lot. If you look at r/HomeschoolerRecovery many stories there are of kids with parents who have no experience teaching and used homeschooling to justify controlling and often abusive behavior.  That said, I don't think this is a sufficient condition for homeschooling, especially unschooling, to work well. Like you said, I think the kid's learning style needs to be compatible with that level of independence, and the parents need to be confident in their abilities to provide the vast set of resources schools can provide.

I remember being shocked how many kids were totally disinterested and disengaged from the thing they were dedicating close to half of their waking hours. That never happened when I was homeschooled - if I wasn't interested in something, or didn't like how something was being taught, it could be done differently. I understand that's a very labor intensive way to teach, and I don't blame kids for being disengaged from the unpaid fulltime job they're being actively coherced into doing. I want to believe school shouldn't be mandatory, and that a lot of kids would benefit from dropping out and getting an apprenticeship in a field that interests them, traveling, or doing ANYTHING that actual engages them and gets them to develop some kind of expertise (even playing videogames or smoking weed all day can built a knowledge base that's useful for many careers). 

In my case, the lack of structure in unschooling hadn't exposed me to enough academic community to inspire me. Sure, we went on group trips to museums and did experiments, but that wasn't the same as having an actual program with a clear path to a field.  At 14 I wanted to be a chef or a massage therapist. After starting school, and getting into AP STEM classes with other motivated kids, I realized I actually do really enjoy math and science and ended up majoring in physics in college. 

I also think a lot of parents underestimate the amount of work and expertise that's required to homeschool, and that can strain the relationship kids have with their parents. For very independent, free-thinking kids who love to read it can work very well. For an anxious, distractible kid like me who needs a little more structure it was a frequent source of conflict. Schools can also act as a site for social workers to provide support in a way that's very difficult to emulate at home. Parents often miss psychological disorders like anxiety, depression, and ADHD in their kids that teachers can recognize right away (I'm having trouble finding the source I had for this, can anyone support or contradict this in an empirical way?) and I suspect I would have had access to medical interventions for some minor mental health problems much earlier on if I had been in school. 

Long story short, I wanted more structure in my life and wanted to be around more kids my age for more of my day. I'd describe myself as a shy extrovert, so I enjoy when the logistics of my life put me around a lot of other people every day (I've really enjoyed cooperative living as an adult). I was also getting frustrated with the lack of structure and found the flexibility of not having a curriculum disorienting. 

That's too bad you have to choose so early on. The kids I saw who seemed the most successful in homeschooling were the ones who started in traditional school, and then left for a specific reason (child actor, competitive figure skater, wanted to write a novel, got bullied, etc). Many kids went back and forth and seemed to do well. A lot of parents homeschool their kids because they want to engrain an ideology on them (whether that be religious or not). I'd encourage you to stay grounded in what's best for your kid and will make them happy and satisfied, and not what lifestyle you want your kid to live. 

They both had pretty negative experiences in grade school, and felt that school was more about "warehousing" and "preparing kids to be cogs in the capitalist machine" than actually teaching and nurturing kids. I agree with that to an extent. 

I'm an only child, which may have exacerbated some of the problems I've mentioned in other comments. Growing up in the Bay Area, there was a pretty active community of unschoolers, and we'd meet up at "Park Days" once or twice a week. Unfortunately, the homeschooler community can be pretty fragmented based on which philosophy of homeschooling you follow. I remember there being many instances of clique-y-ness among the parents (less so among the children somehow), cases of parents not talking to other parents, and groups splintering off into other groups. The result was that the group my family was "in" with was pretty spread out. I had a community, most of them just lived 1hr+ away. 

A friend in college who was very involved in the community kept bring up interesting ideas/events he encountered. When I was commuting a lot, I started listening to the Rationally Speaking and SSC/ACX podcasts, then started following Zvi's covid updates and engaging with 80k hours career coaching. I still don't feel like I'm "part" of the community, and would like to be more involved!

There were a lot of opportunities to dive deep when cool things presented themselves. For example, each year I got to go with my grandma to a natural products convention for two weeks and learned a lot about the supplement/vitamin industry. When I got Rosetta Stone I got to drop all other subjects and binge learn Spanish for a month. That definitely wouldn't have happened in a traditional school.

Lack of socialization was one of the main reasons I wanted to go to traditional high school. Do you have any hobbies that you can commit to more seriously? Are there sports teams, arts programs, hacker spaces, internships you could do that would get you regularly out of the house and around other (young?) people? Many of my homeschooler friends started at city college half time at 14 instead of going to high school, did very well, and got to college way ahead of their peers. That might be a good middle ground if it's available to you.

I think there's potential for it to go well/poorly at any age, and I'd encourage shifting the focus on the specific way the kid can be unschooled, whether they want to or not, and how well suited to it they are.  A lot of parents in my community saw their decision to unschool as protecting the early childhoods of their kids from the stresses of a culture of "academic rigor" that they saw as stress inducing, mind-numbing, and turning kids into cogs of a capitalist machine, and then later allowed or encouraged their kids to go to more traditional or independent high schools. Other parents had kids who did well in traditional elementary school, and were then severely bullied once their peer group hit puberty, to the point their parents looked into radical alternatives. 

I honestly don't know. I'm inclined to think there's a strong genetic component since almost all of my genetic first cousins have some level of clinical anxiety/depression/adhd traits. Possible the unschooling/family dynamic played a role too, but it's hard to tell.

I grew up in California, and many of my friends chose to go to community college part-time instead of high school, and basically got this "modular" design the commenter discusses for later education. I think it worked really well for them. When I was 13 I really wanted an academically "normal" environment, probably irrationally so, maybe a little rebelliously so, which is why I didn't choose to do this. I think expanding California's already very high caliber and affordable community college network to provide a more independent alternative to high school could be a great option for a lot of kids. I have trouble fully understanding how this proposal would be implemented for earlier grades, though it sounds nice. I think decoupling the necessary from the enrichment in school would help a lot. I went to a large urban public high school, and remember seeing a lot of kids who were legally forced to learn a ton of math that had nothing to do with their very real material struggles that could optimistically take a decade to materialize into a tangible career from a teacher who also didn't care about math. I can't help but think these students would have been better served by dropping out of high school, doing a 3 month dev bootcamp, then applying to software engineering jobs, and potentially reentering the school systems once they had more stability in their lives. 

I learned to read really late - at age 8 or 9 I think. I don't remember because there were no grade levels so a lot of experiences are in a blurry age range. This was because I didn't want to - English spelling seemed like a stupid and inefficient way to store information when we could just spell everything phonetically using the IPA or other system. I guess when your parents are willing to do radical things because of their beliefs that teaches you to do the same. I didn't enjoy reading for a very long time, and still find it somewhat tedious. I'd much rather listen to an audiobook at 3x speed while going on a run than sit down and look at a static piece of paper with black lines on it. I now understand this might have been a consequence of then undiagnosed ADHD.