| I was homeschooled all the way through high school, until I started college. Like others have said, the experience you have with homeschooling can vary hugely depending on the people involved. My personal experience is that it was great for me academically, but not so much socially.
Academically, I feel like I got a lot more out of school than I would have if I'd gone to public school. I liked the freedom of it. If I was, say, doing really well in English but really badly in math, it was a piece of cake for me to study English on one grade level and math on another. I got individualized attention, so if I was having trouble with something, I could stay on it for as long as I needed to figure it out and truly understand it. If we wanted to take a family vacation, we could do so whenever we wanted and make up the missed school later on. It was really great from a freedom standpoint (although there's a drawback to that as well--if your kids are TOO free, they might find it hard to adjust to college and work later in life). And there have been a lot of studies to show that homeschooled kids tend to do better on standardized tests.
Unfortunately, I do feel like my social life would have been a lot better if I'd gone to public school. I really didn't have much of a social life at all until I started college--and even now, I still feel more socially awkward than I think I would if I'd been more exposed to people. That's not all due to homeschooling, of course--I'm extremely shy by nature. But I do think I might have learned to deal with my shyness better and earlier if I hadn't been homeschooled. Of course, it doesn't HAVE to be that way. Like others have said, there's plenty of potential ways for kids to get social exposure even if they're homeschooled. My experience was just one that lacked that, and I can tell you that it DOES suck. A lot.
Just my two cents, as someone who's experienced it. | 
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