Home Schooling

While the home education of children has been practiced in many countries, it is most popular and widespread in the United States. Recent estimates indicate that well over a million U.S. children are being home schooled. American public education is currently under attack, given state fiscal crises and the move toward standardization and accountability. Home schooling is a growing, heterogeneous movement of organizations and individuals acting collectively in an effort to better their children's lives. This alternative is becoming increasingly publicly acceptable.

While the roots of education in America can be traced to home and family initiatives, today's home schooling movement has arisen as a reaction against the public educational system. It originated during the 1960s and 1970s within the countercultural or libertarian political left. These pedagogues stood against the bureaucratization and professionalization of public schools and sought personalization and decentralization under family control.

By the 1980s, another influential group began to argue for home schooling from a Christian perspective. Such “ideologues” came largely from the political right, “crusading” against the secular forces of modern society, seeking to impart religious values upon their children. The religious right came to dominate home schooling in the mid-1980s as the libertarian left group diminished. Throughout the 1990s and continuing through the present, home schooling has grown tremendously and has become much more mainstream, advocated for a variety of reasons by average, “mainstream” Americans.

Overall, there is a general consensus among researchers that the decision to home school is motivated by four broad categories of concern: (1) religious values, (2) dissatisfaction with the public schools (safety concerns and negative peer influences, for example), (3) academic and pedagogical concerns, and (4) family life (such as scheduling and children's special needs).

Home schoolers are not a random cross-section of the United States. Home schooling families differ from the average American family in that they are more likely to be white; to be headed by a married, heterosexual couple; to have greater numbers of children; to have college-educated parents; and to have larger annual incomes. Also, this is largely a women's movement as the mothers usually provide about 90% of the home instruction. Unlike most American women, the majority of home schooling mothers are not in the paid labor force.

Scholars of activism and social movements have neglected this large, growing movement. Home schooling is an alternative to public education that has collective components. Home educators do not tend to act in isolation. They work together through networks and organizations. By sharing teaching materials and ideas, taking their children on group fieldtrips, and engaging in other social activities, home schooling parents build a community. Such interaction is likely to reinforce their decision to home educate and to contribute to the formation of a collective, “us” feeling. The actions that parents take in this everyday social movement are powerful—they are history making as parents are influencing the conditions and terms of everyday life for their children.