Can you tell someone doesn't like home schools?

JunkYardBlog fisks this piece sent by a reader.

The tenor of the article is essentially, here's a case where a family home schooled their kids, and something nasty happened. Therefore, let's worry about the risks of home schooling.

The article does mention fears raised by the Columbine shootings, and moves on to cite statistics showing your chances of being killed are less inside a school building than outside it.

I won't bother going over JYB's analysis, merely add my own comments.

How often have you seen someone decide whether he or she likes something, and then start finding evidence to support that position? (More to the point, how often have you seen anyone not do that?) I certainly have. I have a friend who manifestly does not like home schooling. She points to one example of a teenage boy whose behavior is less than perfectly admirable as an indictment of the entire homeschooling concept. (A human male teenager with flaws? I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you!)

Another acquaintance of mine objects to home schooling, claiming it's a red flag to the police and social workers that the parents may be abusing their children. I don't know if it's an official indicator according to any officials or not. I'm not even quite sure where to look. But the reason he personally doesn't approve of home schooling is quite apparent after only a few minutes on the topic. He can't control the curriculum.

To some extent, he has a point. In the presence of weak education standards, parentes who teach only to those standards, and then, by implication, to whatever their particular ideology holds for the rest of the time, will leave their children ill-equipped to handle college work or perhaps even life in a complex world.

Maybe home schooling, driven by standards that would address these objections, would be a good thing all around. In order to force home schools to provide a real education, you have to have high standards. In order to make teachers look good (because they have high test scores and pass rates), you want standards as low as possible. This way, the teachers' unions would have at least some incentive to lobby for higher standards, to make home schooling look as bad as possible.

(Note: not "the teachers", "the teachers' unions".)