​When people envision home-schoolers, they usually picture a conservative Christian family fleeing the public system for religious reasons. While that demographic is common, today’s face of home schooling is changing to include higher numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, with a variety of motivations. The COVID-19 pandemic forced families into schooling at home, and many found that they preferred it.  

In the Colonial and early American eras, educating at home was the norm. But the growth of the common school changed that norm throughout the 20th century. Interestingly, families in the mid- to late 20th century, dissatisfied with what the public schools offered, eventually pursued education that more closely resembled education in earlier days. 

What the story of the rise of the modern home-schooling movement (1960s to 1980s) reveals is that families were motivated by varied reasons, but they shared a belief that they could achieve unique goals only outside of the traditional schooling system.  

Today, home schooling is on the rise. And the reasons for doing so are growing ever more diverse as well. Once again, the unifying reason is that parents can accomplish their ends better on their own.  

Advocates of home schooling 

The proliferation of the common school, starting in 1830, and the passage of compulsory education laws, starting in 1852, created a widespread American culture of sending children to a school building for their education.  

For all the merits of gathering diverse children into a shared American experience and lifting up students destined for poverty, the common school approach also relied on a system of order, obedience, centralization, standardization, and an industrial-era mode of operation. Many of these latter features started to be seen as extreme failures that either needed to be reformed or avoided altogether.  

A radical reform for the time in which it began, the advent of modern home school grew from roots in both the political left and conservative Christian movements during the 1960s and ’70s. Both segments of society developed distinct rationales for forgoing traditional school and seeking a home-school environment.  

On the conservative Christian side of things, people like R.J. Rushdoony and Raymond Moore were vocal champions of why schooling at home was better than traditional school.  

Rushdoony, an American Calvinist philosopher and preacher, emphasized the importance of an at-home Christian religious approach to education as a means to build God’s kingdom – a sort of exodus from the schools of the time.  

Moore and his wife, Dorothy – often called the grandparents of the modern home-schooling movement – advocated for the developmental benefits of kids staying home with parents during their early schooling years, around 8-10 years old – especially for boys – rather than sending them to a more formal education. He and his wife were also Christians and created their own home-schooling approach. 

On more of the political left, Austrian philosopher and Catholic priest Ivan Illich, a radical thinker in the 1970s who helped develop the environmental and alternative health lifestyles movements, published his education theories in several books. His most influential work was his 1971 book, called Deschooling Society, which criticized mass schooling for requiring students to navigate hierarchies to get credentials rather than truly learning in natural ways like through relationships. 

All these contemporary thought leaders and others – whether for religious, developmental or ideological reasons — created a foundation of diverse rationales for why home schooling should be considered better than traditional school settings during the 1960s and ’70s. 

John Holt and the Growing without Schooling newsletter  

Still, home schooling as we think of it today was most heavily influenced by the thought leadership and advocacy of John Holt. 

In some ways, Holt’s background was an embodiment of the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. Though he served in the U.S. Navy, he later joined a pacifist group and was a vocal critic of the Vietnam War. He refused to pay taxes and rebuffed an honorary degree from a university because he believed higher education creates “enslaving institutions.” He was also an open critic of federal efforts to reform or address education crises because it sought only to fix a system that he believed was inherently flawed. He advocated for the rights of children, including their right to choose their own guardians. His counterculture or anti-establishment approach could be seen in his teaching career and education philosophy as well.  

Ultimately, Holt’s education philosophy boiled down to a belief that education ought to be child-led rather than directed by an institution like a school. Holt developed some of his personal theories about education as a former private school teacher. He was fired for bucking the administration’s traditional procedures like giving assessments or using new pedagogical approaches. His ideas also came from observing other modern-day classrooms and taking notes of what he witnessed.  

Though he wrote many articles and several books in his lifetime, his first published book was the 1964 book How Children Fail, which asserted that compulsory schooling killed a child’s innate curiosity and replaced it with fear to conform to authority.  

But Holt’s lasting influence and legacy really stem from when in 1977 he started publishing the first homeschooling newsletter called Growing Without Schooling. In it, Holt would share practical ideas and stories of families who were already home-schooling. In response, he would receive letters from parents looking to continue the conversation. Holt ran his bi-monthly newsletter and correspondence until he died in 1985, though the newsletter continued in publication until 2001.  

Holt also championed “unschooling,” a term he coined that included schooling that did not have to take place at home. His work, however, has culminated in inspiring families to look for a range of ways to instruct children outside of a traditional school setting, an umbrella approach that for many has driven the homeschooling movement. 

What Holt started among families with his newsletter spilled into a greater political need once they ran into legal hurdles in their states. 

Creation of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association 

As the intellectual underpinnings for homeschooling grew in popularity, so did the need for the corresponding practical and legal resources.  

By the early 1980s, relatively few families were home-schooling, which meant those who were doing so often sought out practical home-school ideas and guidance. Some state governments created extreme challenges for families by putting parents in jail for contributing to truancy or delinquency (something that happened as recently as 2019 in Mississippi, though the charges were dropped). Others are less extreme but have laws about parent requirements to home-school. For instance, some states require a parent to have a high school diploma or GED. Every state allows parents to home-school without a teaching certificate unless, as is the case in some states, parents try to qualify to home-school under a “private tutor” category. 

Michael Farris was an attorney and a home-schooling father in Washington state who would often be contacted by home-schooling families when they needed legal counsel. Farris realized there was a need to start an organization to offer home-schooling families legal representation more broadly. He partnered with Mike Smith, another attorney and home-schooling father based in California, to open a nonprofit organization aimed at making home schooling legal in every state and to fund the legal representation of home-schooling families.  

In 1983, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) was created. Its influence has been a crucial factor in the legislative victories across the nation to secure the right of parents to instruct their children at home. And HSLDA, as it was first conceived, also won court cases defending families who were getting pushback from their state government. The organization is heavily influenced by Christian philosophies, and its advocacy matched the growing home-schooling momentum of the 1980s – seeking a more religiously based education. From this era sprung the now-common stereotype of the Christian, right-leaning home-school family.  

Today home schooling is legal in every state, but the organization is still a source of resources and information for families who need practical help in home schooling. 

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, more states have adopted education savings accounts to fund at-home education, though this is legally not considered home schooling by groups like the HSLDA. Still, their work philosophically supports those families who do not want to send their children to a school for their education. 

Conclusion 

Today’s home-schooling movement is growing increasingly diverse, both religiously and politically. Rapid momentum in the school choice movement has also created new education models, including hybrid approaches, which are publicly funded, but instruction and learning take place outside of a traditional school setting – often at home. Examples include distance learning programs offered by public charter schools and school districts, or a la carte education from education savings accounts.  

These hybrid approaches illustrate a resurgence and growing appetite among people wanting an approach to learning closer to the one that predated the common school era and dominated America’s education landscape in the early decades of the nation’s existence. Whatever the funding formulas or pedagogical models look like, these at-home education families have the modern home-schooling era to thank for creating and establishing their philosophical and legal framework.