Home schooling is a form of education in which children learn at home rather than in a conventional classroom, with their parents as their primary teachers. Approximately 1.5 to 2 million American children are home schooled today, and home schooling is a rapidly growing subset of the educational community, increasing by 10–30% each year. According to educational researcher Patricia Lines, home schooling “is one of the most significant social trends of the past half century.”

Home schooling is not a new practice: For much of human history, children routinely have been educated at home. Institutionalized education is a more recent phenomenon, becoming near-universal in the United States with the enactment of compulsory school attendance laws in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although home schooling has ...