HOME SCHOOLING

HOME SCHOOLING, the practice of educating one's own children, saw dramatic growth over the last two decades of the twentieth century. Home schoolers numbered about 15,000 in the 1970s; by 1999 850,000 children were learning at home. Long the normative practice on the American frontier, parent-directed EDUCATION was almost entirely eclipsed with the accomplishment of universal compulsory schooling in the early twentieth century. But in the wake of the "anti-Establishment" cultural ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, home schooling reemerged, championed by advocates across a wide ideological spectrum.

The contemporary home school movement has a dual history. One branch began in the left-liberal alternative school movement of the 1960s, a cause that sought to democratize teacher-student relationships and give students greater discretion in directing their own educations. John Holt, long an advocate of alternative schooling, began to promote home education (which he called "unschooling") in the 1970s. Before his death in 1985, Holt nurtured a national grassroots network of home school converts. Another branch grew out of the conservative Protestant day school movement, specifically through the work of Raymond and Dorothy Moore, whose several books and national speaking tours advocating home education reached a ready audience of religious families already skeptical of public schools.

One of the first tasks of the fledgling movement was to secure the legality of the practice. Spurred by a small but well-organized home school lobby, judicial and legislative activity throughout the 1980s rendered home education legal throughout the United States by the end of the decade. The process of legalization was facilitated by the distinctive jurisdictional structure of American education. Because authority over schooling is largely in the hands of state and local governments in the United States, activists were able to wage localized battles and win victories in piecemeal fashion.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, home education was not only legal but also broadly accepted in the United States. Home schooling was made easier by favorable laws, an elaborate network of support and advocacy groups at the local and national levels, and a vital sector of small businesses that supplied curriculum materials of all kinds to a growing home school market.

While the home school movement is a nominally international one, with at least a few adherents in most nations of the industrialized world, it is a distinctively American invention. The basic ideas that animate home education—that each learner is unique, that government schools are not doing their job well, and that educational professionals are unnecessary for sound instruction—are in keeping with the individualism and skepticism of formal authority that have characterized the national culture throughout its history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bielick, Stacey, Kathryn Chandler, and Stephen Broughman. Homeschooling in the United States: 1999 (NCES 2001-033). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 2001. The first nationally representative survey of the U.S. home school population.

Moore, Raymond, and Dorothy Moore. Home Grown Kids. Waco, Tex: Word Books, 1981. A popular defense of home education.

Stevens, Mitchell L. Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. A sociological account of the rise of home education in the United States.