Going mainstream

Everyone’s lives changed in March 2020, after the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in the United States. For the next year or two, offices went remote, restaurants barely scraped by on takeout orders, and schools went to Zoom. Remote working parents suddenly found themselves at home with their schooling children. Not only did many of them not like what they saw in their child’s school life, but the entire experience desensitized them to the idea of merging the words home and school. By the 2021–2022 school year, the number of homeschooling students went from 2.5 million to 3.7 million. Numbers continue to rise.

Many Americans were used to associating homeschooling with Jim Bob Duggar and fundamentalist Christians, so this recent homeschooling revolution has struck them as equal parts shocking and ridiculous. In Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream (Eerdmans, 216 pp.), Dixie Dillon Lane, a home­schooling mother herself, pulls back the curtain on a group of Americans who, by experience and necessity, have often lived quiet lives.

Lane documents how homeschooling went from radical to mainstream. Yet in doing so, she invites the question of whether homeschoolers are losing something fundamental in their newly acquired cultural acceptance. It’s not that they can’t be culturally accepted to be right, but that such cultural acceptance often comes with a variety of caveats as the accepted class makes more and more concessions to remain accepted.

Early homeschool families, whom Lane discusses in the first part of her book, faced grueling legal battles, social isolation, and potential prison time. If you homeschooled before the 1990s, you probably felt you had to, often for religious reasons. The public, insofar as they even knew homeschoolers existed, asked themselves not whether homeschooling was the best for children, but whether it should be legal at all. In extreme cases, homeschooling parents had to repeatedly defend themselves against accusations of abuse and negligence: Today’s homeschoolers only have to answer uncomfortable questions about whether their children have “real friends” or have ever asked a girl out on a date.

The rise of organizations like Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) in the 1980s provided a legal backing for early homeschoolers. No longer did they have to fight state edu­cation departments and child protective services on their own. Highly trained lawyers had their back pro bono. “It would be difficult to exaggerate the change that HSLDA membership wrought in the feeling of security among homeschoolers,” Lane writes.

Post-2020, Lane writes later in the book, “the new homeschoolers were neither weird, nor fringe, nor broadly countercultural. They were ordinary people who sought something better than pandemic-conventional schooling for their children and were willing to exercise their parental authority to make this attempt through homeschooling.”

The new homeschoolers were not necessarily white, not necessarily conservative, and perhaps most notably, not necessarily Christian. Homeschooling has earned its place of acceptance in society, with the pandemic tipping the scales in favor of the practice for many parents who would not otherwise choose an out-of-the-box education style. As a socially acceptable option, more people chose it, but as more people chose it, homeschooling no longer guaranteed a certain religious or political motivation.

Whether a net positive or negative, the mainstreaming of homeschooling has given more voices to the home­schooling debate. Homeschoolers and public-schoolers are more likely to mingle, making the line between the two groups quite a bit fuzzier. Homeschoolers today are far more comfortable with government involvement, such as through education grants or dual-enrolled classes or sports. The shift would be shocking to the libertarian mindset that animated early home­schooling. And the question still stands: If the government and the public ever decided to revert to their old opinions on homeschooling, would today’s homeschoolers have the fortitude or practical ability to extricate themselves from the claws of state education departments?