Unschooling/homeschooling unfortunately requires a lot of time spent with the kid. I think unschooling is absolutely best for every child but I can see why it's not best for every parent (or any parent!).
When people say unschooling, they usually mean a certain type of homeschooling, but IMO, if you give your kid the choice of education and your kid decides to go to public school, that's still unschooling, although the name becomes somewhat metaphorical. You can imagine that school would be much different if the kid wants to be there. Unfortunately, that comes with the downsides of school, such as a strict schedule/location,
in loco parentis, etc., so I think it's useful to talk about homeschooling and unschooling independently.
One frequent criticism of unschooling is, "But what if the child doesn't CHOOSE to learn [insert very important subject]?" but that's actually not a concern because one of the following will occur:
a) The child learns it by accident in the course of living life. This frequently happens with basic math.
b) The child goes through his entire life without being too inconvinienced by the lack of that knowledge, meaning it wasn't all that important to learn.
c) The child needs the knowledge for something and will choose to learn it then. This may be at a later age then schooled kids would learn it, but there's nothing wrong with that.
To what extent that concern is true, I think it's actually more problematic in high school. For example, cooking is a very useful skill, but the class for that is usually an elective. So what if the kid doesn't CHOOSE to learn how to cook?! He'll only realize how important it is after graduating and will be eating canned soup and take-out for the rest of his life!
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On many levels we still think homeschooling offers significant advantages to a child, but we are not parents for whom homeschooling would work out too well, so we send the kids to school and supplement with real world teachings at home.
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Do you let your kids handle school the way Steve handled college?
Most of these tips seem like they'd be just as valuable for kid-level school, but I think most parents would be outraged at their kid doing some of them, especially #5 and the idea that you should avoid [the need for] studying outside of class.
When I got a 95% on my spelling tests, my step-dad gave me a speech about how I should never sell myself short.
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The fact that people would remove children from schools to learn by themselves sounds great, but what about math or biology or chemistry? Calculus you cannot learn from nature without reconstructing several centuries of work.
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Math/calculus, biology, and chemistry all exist in the real world. If they didn't, there'd be no need to learn them. You'd probably get a book (or website or even a teacher of some kind) to help with most of those, but there's nothing wrong with that.