Most home-schooled kids have some sort of structure to their day, and some do make it successfully into young adulthood, but my prsonal experiences with them over the years has indicated that those (yourself as you say, Sean) are the exception, not the rule.

I had a next door neighbor who subscribed to this unschool philosophy. Her kids did whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. I mean whatever. She parked her ass on her sofa and watch daytime TV and could care less where her kids were or what they were doing so long as they weren't disturbing her. A few months before I moved away, I remember them having to take the state assessments for their grade level. They all did poorly. This woman had the nerve to act surprised. Then she went on to blame the education institution. She would tell everyone in the neighborhood how she could not understand how we could have our kids in such a poorly run school sysem. I lived right next to her, and I remember her asking me and my wife (our kids were the same ages as hers) how we could be so narrow-minded as to force institutional learning onto our kids. She could not accept that her lack of attention to her kids' learning was the reason her kids would not be recognized by the state as having successfully completed their respective grades. The only thing they appeared to be learning was how to redirect their own failures and project them onto others.

Just like the interviewee said: unschooling - and homeschooling - require a high degree of parental involvement to work.

You can't just park you kids and expect magic to happen.