The Homeschooling Imperative

Avoiding the Homogenizing Filter of Government Education

By guest contributor Beaver Dan.

If you are an American, there is a good chance that you know someone who either has been homeschooled or is a parent of someone who is currently being homeschooled. But as anything in America, homeschooling has its own tradition, history, and intricacies that make American homeschooling not only unique, but special and vital for the future.

Despite its prevalence, homeschooling has been a deeply misunderstood subject in our zeitgeist. The term “homeschooling” implies that it is education that takes place only at home, with the parent as the tutor. And while it can be that way, the term’s literal meaning does not encapsulate the full scope of homeschooling. Simply put, homeschooling is just an education that does not take place at a government or private school. (Mind you, private schools are still under government oversight when it comes to the curriculum to be a certified school.) Homeschooling is simply schooling that takes place outside of the government’s boundaries.

Homeschooling has been around for millennia and was in fact the norm before the 1920s. However, modern American homeschooling had its roots in the 1960s with hippies, and then Evangelical Christians, losing their faith in the government’s approach to education and its structured, secularized nature. People like R.J. Rushdoony, a Calvinist philosopher, theologian, and historian, began making the case for the dismantling of public schools.

The ’70s and early ’80s saw the birth of the two intellectual masterminds of homeschooling: John Holt, himself a Yale graduate, who was able to create a coherent moral and legal theory of homeschooling, spawning Homeschooling as a coherent movement through the newsletter Growing Without Schooling (1977–2001); and Raymond Moore, author of Home Grown Kids (1981), through which he popularized the idea of homeschooling.

The History

The First Wave: The Beginning of a Movement and Its Legal Groundwork

While homeschooling was technically legal, it had exceedingly stringent restrictions, which had to be hard fought against. The movement’s first and most important victory came in 1972 with the Supreme Court case Wisconsin v. Yoder, which established the precedent that children of religious communities could be exempted from compulsory education on grounds of religious freedom. This conclusion was later expanded to the idea that parents have a recognized right to educate their children as they see fit, a right that had not been formally and explicitly recognized before. A multitude of organizations were spawned in the late ’70s which advocated legal reforms at the local level regarding homeschooling.

The earliest homeschoolers were not exclusively conservative Christians; rather, they were concerned parents convinced by Holt and Moore of the inefficiency and harm inherent in the school system. Parents would still work alongside schoolboards and teachers to create curriculums. This was not a rebellion against the ideas taught by the state, but a rebellion against the structure of education.

The Second Wave: Growth and Improvisation

This second wave of homeschooling came in the early ’80s and was characterized by its distinctive conservative Christian flavor, as well as the improvised nature of it. Because of the lack of non-state-approved schooling resources, parents who were skeptical of state curriculums were left almost resourceless to educate their kids, a big number of them relying on improvisation. Evangelical parents, skeptical of the content being taught at school, adopted an antagonistic approach.

Government schools and homeschoolers entered into legal battles, as both sides saw each other as threats. It is also important to notice that by this time, the number of homeschooled children began to explode, relative to previous years. School officials saw homeschoolers as a direct threat to the system.

While there were success stories, it is almost undeniable that this second wave was a disaster, as it focused on sheltering the kids rather than giving them a proper education. While kids in public schools were having questionable learning and socializing experiences, homeschooled kids were left inside their homes, with insufficient education, isolated from the outside world. In the most extreme (though rare) cases, the kids would simply not receive an education at all due to the laziness of their parents, as a few homeschooled Millennial and late-Gen-X people I know have confirmed.

This abject failure of the second wave made it so that, by the late ’80s and ’90s, homeschooled kids were notorious for having poor academic and social skills. Hence, the stereotype of the poorly socialized homeschooled kid.

The Third Wave: A More Structured Approach

By the mid ’90s, all legal holdouts that prevented proper homeschooling in some states were finally defeated. This allowed for support networks and institutions to emerge, facilitating quality education for homeschooled children. Instead of improvised local curriculums, parents could now opt for different methods of educating their children.

New models such as the “hybrid” model were developed, where the child would attend an in-person class once or twice a week and do the rest of his or her learning at home. Hybrid models tend to have smaller classes, of fewer than 15 pupils. “Pods,” where two or more families join together, mimic traditional schooling in their approach to education, although they differ in that the families know which classmates their children will have. In “microschools,” a certified teacher teaches to a small number of pupils in a one-room school.

This third wave cemented Homeschooling as a legitimate pedagogical alternative for children, with many success stories proving that, indeed, homeschooled kids could have an advantage over kids who go to traditional institutions (especially because, by this time, the general decline in the quality of education was well underway). But despite these successes, the culture still associated homeschoolers with sheltered and poorly socialized kids who were not prepared to face the “real world.”

The Fourth Wave: A Growing Acceptance

The rise of the Internet brought immense improvements to homeschooling. Homeschoolers were no longer just the children of hippies and Evangelical Christians. Online resources made homeschooling easier by providing heretofore impossible flexibility. With just an Internet connection, parents had access to entire curriculums.

The fourth wave was characterized by the beginning of the normalization of homeschooling into the broader culture, as well as an ever-increasing number of homeschooled children throughout the nation. While stereotypes still existed, they were losing ground. This explosion in homeschooling was due to the drastic and blatant decline of the public education system and the concerns of parents over the left-wing rewriting of curriculums. This wave was marked by an ever-growing loss of faith in traditional education systems.

The Fifth Wave: The Total Consolidation into the System

The current wave of homeschooling came about with the 2020 pandemic. Draconian and schizophrenic safety measures made learning from home mandatory. As the quality of education plummeted on all levels, and as parents saw what had been going on in the classrooms, a mass movement of parents began pulling their kids out of school.

It is now common to scroll through social media and see a myriad of videos and articles showing footage of school violence that looks like it came straight out of a prison. Pair that with articles about teachers getting arrested for grooming students (seriously, it seems like every week some young teacher is arrested for sleeping with a student), a constant drop in test scores, and the most dystopian and ridiculous demoralizing propaganda coming from ideologues passing as teachers.

It had come to the perfect time where the strong desire to pull children out of government schools found an entire infrastructure that had been built over the decades: homeschooling was now not only possible, but readily accessible and, in many cases, easier for the parents and children. Homeschoolers doubled during the lockdowns. Now, homeschooling is not something relegated to hippies and Evangelical Christians, but an ecosystem so widespread and entrenched in American society that everyone knows someone who either homeschools or is planning on homeschooling.

There exist today entire businesses, events, programs, and societies for all types of homeschooling parents. Homeschooling is the most accessible it has ever been, and this will only continue as America’s educational institutions keep deteriorating in the public eye. This will make for an interesting future where new generations have been educated on such wholly different values, having never gone through the homogenizing filter of government education.

The Need for Homeschooling

The school system, by its egalitarian nature, prevents the nourishment of geniuses. Geniuses in the past were masters of their craft at a young age, and that is because they were not taught a superficial lesson of various fields. Geniuses would find one area to develop their male autism and push the boundaries of what was previously thought possible. Sure, there was Classical education wherein those in the upper class would be educated in the Western Canon, but it was highly selective and had absolutely no intentions in dumbing down the lessons for those students who were not able to perform.

Homeschooling brings us back to a framework in which different people get different education for their different needs. In an egalitarian environment, normal people are held hostage by the bottom 20 percent dragging every standard to the lowest common denominator. I need not make an allegory to real life, as any American is more than aware of what public education can become just because of a few uncivilized students.

The education system has a homogenizing effect. By way of managerialism, all regional distinctions are eroded, and local myths and tales are swept aside thanks to the power of the faceless centralized manager. Though states have a say in what goes on in their school systems, the federal government has a vested interest in centralizing all power when it comes to education. This can be seen by their federal bans on religious education in public schools, the Department of Education itself, and the federal funding that influences what can be taught at different schools — funding which they threaten to pull should a school not comply with federal mandates.

It has never been easier to homeschool your children. We have learned from the mistakes of the past, and have continuously evolved the way homeschooling is done. People are different, meaning that they are not equal, and only homeschooling provides the flexibility befitting the needs of the parents, children, and community writ large. I am not saying that every homeschooler will be successful; the very nature of it makes the kid very dependent on the resources the parents and community are willing to give him. But this is also the case in public school. If anything, it is worse there because people just accept it since it is an “accredited” institution, so its failures do not cause the outrage that those of an incompetent parent do. There is no longer an excuse to condemn your kids to public school. If you do so, you hate them.

Those who want to preserve beauty and ensure a non-worthless future have a vested interest in the success and perpetuation of homeschooling, an environment where the next generation can continue American traditions and rebel against the homogenizing tide of the civilizational death cult being imposed upon us. If you can and are willing, support your local homeschoolers: help those you know who have children to access the resources they may need to homeschool their children, help their children socialize with other homeschooled kids, and help bring up the next generation of Americans.

More Resources:

This is a short article meant as an introduction into homeschooling. If you would like to dive into this rabbit hole, I used these resources when researching this topic:

• Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the most important legal landmark for the movement.

• “A Brief History of Homeschooling,” ResponsibleHomeschooling.org, Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

• “A Journey Through the History of Homeschooling,” EduMonitor.

• Brian D. Ray, “Research Facts on Homeschooling: Homeschool Fast Facts,” National Home Education Research Institute, May 29, 2024.