Homeschoolers Aren’t Weird (Anymore) – Religion & Liberty Online

In her short, accessible book, Skipping School, Dixie Dillon Lane traces how American homeschooling went “mainstream.” Combining quantitative research with qualitative interviews, Lane has written a compelling history of an important but notoriously “hidden” population in American education. A trained historian and homeschool mom, Lane strikes just the right tone, approaching the subject professionally, from the inside.

In the latter half of the 20th century, Lane writes, the typical homeschooler was “countercultural, anti-institutional, fearful, and even reactionary.” Details are scant, but of the few who homeschooled, most were white, conservative, and religious—from the outsider’s perspective, a bit weird if not dangerous. Even as late as 1985, three in four Americans polled thought homeschooling was “a bad thing for the nation.” In the ‘90s and early 2000s, the number of homeschoolers increased, but it remained a fringe movement.

Everything changed in 2020, when public schools moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeing inside the “classroom” for the first time, some parents grew frustrated by the poor quality of their children’s education, others with the ideological slant of the instruction. Plus, Zoom learning required “at least as much parental involvement” as homeschooling, “so why not homeschool instead?”

Today, more than 5% of American children are homeschooled in one way or other, twice the number of kids attending Catholic schools. Lane argues that it has become a “reintegrated, postinstitutional practice” marked by “racial, political, and socioeconomic” diversity, driven by a host of motivations, and leading to remarkable academic results. The typical homeschooler is independent, sure, but many homeschooling families participate in institutions and join communities outside the home a la carte: They send their kids to baseball practice or ballet and enroll them in band or science classes at the local public school. Indeed, Lane argues that, in some ways, homeschoolers are more social than other kids, visiting local libraries at twice the rate of public school children, for example.

Demographically, homeschoolers nearly match the rest of the country. About half of homeschoolers are white, and the number of black homeschoolers nearly quintupled in 2020 alone, levelling off at about 6.8 million in 2023. Homeschoolers run the gamut of political persuasions, from “hippy to Q-Anon,” according to one parent that Lane interviewed.

Why do people decide to homeschool? Most do so for “a complex array of reasons,” writes Lane. According to the most recent data from the Department of Education, 83% of homeschooling parents cite their “concern about [the] environment of other schools”; three in four mention their “desire to provide moral instruction” to their children; and 72% list their “desire to emphasize family life together” and “dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools” as important factors. Only about one in two cite “religious instruction” as important. If accurate, Lane writes, the numbers suggest that “the movement itself is not primarily a religious one.”

Finally, homeschoolers who take the ACT perform significantly better than their public school counterparts and only slightly below those in private schools. Lane readily admits the self-selection problems with these data but adds that “homeschoolers have done just fine.”

Homeschoolers, it seems, are finally normal.

A Brief History of Modern Homeschooling

How did homeschooling go mainstream? Lane begins the story with the United States’ attempts to nationalize public education in the aftermath of World War II. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that de jure segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment and subsequently ordered every public school in the country to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” beginning unprecedented federal control of local schools. Similarly, in response to the existential threat of Soviet communism and nuclear war, Congress increased funding for science, math, and foreign language education in order to, as President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed in 1958, equip children “to live in the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles.” With the allure of federal funding, experts at the national level began to effectively dictate portions of public school curricula. Then, to accurately measure the results, public schools implemented standardized tests, such as the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which some parents feared introduced godless philosophies into the classroom. The Supreme Court’s decisions in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), prohibiting school-sponsored prayer and Bible-reading in public schools, respectively, further support Lane’s point.

In the 1950s and ’60s, many parents looked for alternatives to America’s new, top-down (and apparently secularist) approach to public education. Some resisted integration and, when that failed, founded private “segregationist” academies. (Nearly 100 politicians signed on to Senator Strom Thurmond’s “Southern Manifesto,” claiming that Brownviolated “the rights reserved to the states and to the people,” including the right of parents to “direct the lives and education of their own children.”) Others reimagined John Dewey’s experimental, child-centric views on education and reinvested in “free schools” throughout the country. And others, searching for “anti-institutional solutions,” began homeschooling.

Since homeschooling in the early years was at best only questionably legal, homeschoolers intentionally hid from public view. We flew “under the radar,” one parent Lane interviewed said. According to Lane, homeschooling parents in California had three options to comply with state law: Parents with teaching credentials could claim the status of “tutors.” Parents could create “private schools” in their living rooms. (“We have a very strict entrance requirement at this school,” one parent said. “You have to be a member of the family.”) Or parents could simply withdraw their kids from school “and see what happened.”

Intensely decentralized, homeschooling may have fizzled out were it not for an eclectic group of public intellectuals who legitimized and popularized it in the 1970s and ’80s. “American homeschooling’s first public spokesperson,” John Holt, a nonreligious, quasi-hippie critic of formal education, advocated “unschooling.” Children have “tremendous capacity for learning,” he wrote. Rather than coercing children to supply the correct answers on tests, children should be provided with “rich and stimulating learning environment” so that they can pursue their loves and learn “when they are ready.” He concluded that public schools were beyond repair and turned to homeschooling.

Similarly, in the early 1970s, Raymond Moore, a Seventh-day Adventist with extensive experience in the classroom and at the U.S. Office of Education, also grew disillusioned with early childhood education. Raymond and his wife, Dorothy, argued that early schooling dulled children’s brains and even “permanently damaged” their eyesight. Then, in the 1980s, fundamentalist, Protestant Christians joined the fray, including the “conservative media superstar” James Dobson (whose Focus on the Family became the sine qua non of the movement) and the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), founded by J. Michael Smith and Michael Ferris. According to Lane, Holt, Moore, Dobson, and Smith and Ferris rescued homeschooling from obscurity. Further research might explore some of the different homeschooling philosophies, not just John Holt’s “unschooling” but also Classical Education’s focus on the trivium and quadrivium and Charlotte Mason’s emphasis on “living books” and outdoor play.

By the 21st century, homeschoolers “had come out of the shadows.” From 2003 to 2007, the number of homeschoolers increased by nearly 50%, from 1.1 million to 1.5 million. If the internet gave parents the option of “sending” their children to “virtual schools” from the comfort of their home, Lane writes that the movement was still somewhat motivated by fear. In 2010, for example, a national homeschooling conference hosted practical workshops on “Math Games” alongside talks about “How Life Will Change with Obama.” Was this fear justified? Maybe.

In 2008, just two years before, a California court declared homeschooling illegal, arguing it did not count as a private school under state law (though the same court reversed its decision later that year). Today, unlike in Europe, homeschooling is legal in all 50 states, but the Supreme Court has never recognized it as a constitutional right; instead, in the decision of Board of Education v. Allen (1968), the Court ruled that the state’s interest in children receiving education from “teachers of specified training” meant that “instruction at home” fails to meet the standards set by compulsory education statutes. Homeschooling is politically accepted but constitutionally tenuous, protected by a significant shift in cultural attitudes but not clearly secured by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution.

Parents and Children

Homeschooling is a decentralized, eclectic movement, and Lane’s book helps dispel some of “the inaccurate stereotypes of homeschoolers as anti-social, anti-institutional conservative Christians.” My wife and I were both homeschooled. The oldest of four kids, I grew up alongside other homeschooling, evangelical families at our church, while my wife’s homeschooling friends were artsy and nonreligious. I’m sure we were “weird”: My family had chickens and competed at speech and debate tournaments; she played “Civil War” in the backyard, her brother trying to sound out “Reveille” on the bugle while she tended to the wounded.

In the ’90s, it took courage to homeschool; my dad says most people thought he and my mom were stupid for not sending us to school. For the most part, that’s not true today. Homeschoolers, as a whole, are normal. Just one example: Long before she became famous, Billie Eilish, hardly the poster child for Christian fundamentalism, was homeschooled with her older brother. She colorfully promotes her experience as if she were a John Holt disciple: No one wants to eat when “somebody’s shoving things in your throat,” she says. Like many parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell decided to homeschool for a complex set of reasons: family unity, fear of school shootings after Columbine, Billie’s Tourette’s syndrome, seeing other families do it well. Homeschooling, Billie’s mom says, allowed the kids “to do the things that they really love to do and not have a giant academic schedule on top of it.” “We got to be out in the world camping and going to parks and field trips.” Echoing this sentiment, one parent Lane interviewed said that she decided to homeschool when she realized that “teacher heaven would be a van and six kids and unlimited gas—we’d just go on field trips.”

While a disorganized and diverse movement, homeschooling is, at bottom, about parents’ love for their kids and their desire to be intimately involved in their children’s education. As Lane writes, homeschooling “helped parents further tailor their kids’ education to their particular needs.” When I was young, I hated reading—until my mom donned a babushka, found a funny voice, and made learning fun. When my wife was young, she also hated reading—until her mom realized that she showed signs of dyslexia and sought help. We now homeschool our children, so we recently asked our moms for advice: “The best books to read to your children,” my mom said, “are the ones you love.” Joy is infectious. And in the words of the Preamble of the Constitution, are there more important “blessings of Liberty” than the freedom to pass down our joys to “our Posterity,” and, in so doing, help them discover their own?