It is doing just that! Public and private schools have a lot to offer but a lot of parents are bypassing these advantages in trying to shelter their kids from real world experiences. My contention is, that if parents have schooled their kids correctly in moral values, they won't have to worry so much about the influences of drugs, sex and rock n' roll.
Gifted and talented kids, indeed, do well in homeschooled learning environments BUT not all kids are G&T and parents are perhaps the worst judge of assessing that fact due to inherent bias. Kids that are not G&T do much better in homogeneous groupings: Private or public school classrooms.
I don't know what "real world experiences" are necessary or healthy for children, but I doubt there's many to be found primarily or solely in the public school system. Public schools are, IMHO, very poor imitations of the real world. At best, they might be able to imitate an undergraduate university environment, but I doubt many even achieve that.
Kids that are not G&T do much better in homogeneous groupings: Private or public school classrooms.
How do you define homogeneous? Almost all my classes were racially, socially, economically, and intellectually diverse. And every fifty-five minutes I got to run through a crowded hallway into a completely different, equally diverse grouping; each class had its own teacher with his or her unique methods and expectations. (Asides: Is homogeneity the new diversity? Is it a characteristic of the "real world?" Does it inculcate positive attitudes or thinking?")
Colleges have a lot to offer that parents cannot afford: good libraries, science labs, computers, etc.
And schools don't?
Are you actually comparing a college library to a public high school library? Every university library I've been in was one of several dedicated buildings, had multiple floors, and at least one was a federal depository. In addition to the usual subjects, some maintained rare books, and I think all had subscriptions to academic journals and other periodicals, and they maintained bound volumes of those periodicals going back decades. My high school library was a room with a few shelves (of mostly fiction) that teachers' aides had to walk through to get to the AV equipment. Students weren't even allowed to use it during lunch, and the vice principal regularly swept through to kick out students without passes. (I never volunteered the fact that I didn't have a pass, so he left me alone.)
Maybe I was just deprived in high school, or spoiled by university libraries, I dunno. But I doubt most high school, public or private, have libraries comparable to those of a college or university.
Forty acres???? And a mule???? You sure are our friends, I guess!