Homeschooling

Homeschooling is the provision of education to children in the setting of a private home rather than at a public or private school. The children are generally educated by their own parents or by tutors whom the parents hire. Parents who choose to homeschool their children do so for a wide variety of reasons. Some parents’ strong religious beliefs motivate them to remove their children from public schools so that they will not be exposed to information that conflicts with those beliefs. There are many other factors apart from religion that can make homeschooling an attractive option, however. For example, economics and geography can be compelling influences, as when a family can only afford to live in an area with underresourced public schools. Other families opt to homeschool as a means of protecting their children from situations they see as harmful, such as exposure to bullying, drugs, or other social ills prevalent at traditional schools. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, many parents began to homeschool their children, at least on a temporary basis, to prevent them from catching the virus. Finally, and perhaps most commonly, parents who can afford the financial burden of homeschooling may do so for no other reason than a desire for what they perceive to be the highest quality of instruction for their children.

Brief History

For centuries, schooling was noncompulsory in most countries, meaning that people were able to choose to provide an education for their children from professional instructors but that there was no legal requirement to do so. For most households, children were given basic instruction at home and spent the bulk of their time assisting with the support of the family. When public schooling began to be required in the latter half of the nineteenth century, some families either lived too far away from areas with large enough populations to require schools or chose not to have their children participate. It was not always easy for individuals who objected to formal education to resist the legal and social pressure to conform, and this gave rise to a spirited debate between those who argued that mandatory schooling confers benefits to society and to children that are not available through other means, and those who felt just as strongly that such education would be either ineffective or affirmatively harmful.

In the United States, the vast majority of education regulations are left up to the individual states to determine and implement. Instead of the federal government imposing a single solution across the nation, individual states have implemented homeschooling rules and requirements that vary widely, though by 1993 it was legal in all fifty states. The modern homeschooling movement in the United States began in the mid-1960s. Educator and writer John Holt wrote several books and advocated a new form of education that became the unschooling movement (student-driven education), which grew out of left-leaning political movements of the decade. The movement began in earnest in the late 1960s.

The second wave of the modern homeschooling movement began in the 1970s with the writing and philosophies of Dr. Raymond Moore, who advocated homeschooling during a child’s early years and starting formal education in the fourth grade. Moore’s philosophy was influenced by Gregg Harris, who appealed to evangelical and fundamentalist Christian groups to homeschool as a way to bypass the secularism of public schools. In the 1980s, homeschooling largely belonged to this fundamentalist movement. There was a push throughout the decade to make it a uniformly legal practice. After it became legal nationwide in 1993, homeschooling became increasingly popular. Homeschooling and unschooling grew significantly in the decades since, and has continued to grow.

Overview

Parents choose to homeschool or unschool their children for a variety of reasons. Religion is still a prominent reason for homeschooling; however, many parents choose to homeschool their children because they find local schools insufficient or because they want to tailor education to their child’s strengths and curiosities. While some homeschooling parents choose to educate their children from preschool through college, homeschooling is often a temporary decision. Some parents choose to homeschool their children only during the early elementary years, while a child experiences a physical, mental, or emotional problem, or while living temporarily in an inferior school district, for example. This was also the case during the COVID-19 pandemic in the early 2020s, when some families chose to homeschool their children while virus case rates were high and masks were required at in-person schools. During the 2021–22 school year, approximately 3.1 million American students between kindergarten and grade twelve were homeschooled, compared to 2.5 million in 2019. That trend appeared to continue even after the worst of the pandemic was over. In 2024, close to 4 million Americans were estimated to be homeschooled.

Homeschoolers and advocates point out that homeschooled children are just as successful academically as those educated in traditional schools. For example, the College Board reported that in 2014, mean SAT scores for homeschooled high school seniors were higher than the mean scores for all seniors who took the test that year. Parents who teach their children but do not have a teaching certificate or degree have access to a variety of course materials. There are online tutors that they can use to teach or assist with teaching their children, downloadable curricula are provided by a number of different institutions, and online academies and learning portals such as Khan Academy provide additional outlets for learning.

Some educators have expressed concern that children who are homeschooled may not be sufficiently prepared for the academic rigors of college. Many institutions of higher education, however, have begun to adapt their admissions practices to accommodate the needs and situations of homeschooling families. The numbers of homeschooled students in college are still relatively small, but many schools make the application process accessible for homeschoolers, although they may require extra exams or letters of recommendation as part of the application. Homeschoolers are particularly welcome at colleges looking to diversify their applicant pool.

One often-raised concern is that homeschooled children will miss out on the socialization that is part of everyday life for children who attend school. Many parents and child development experts affirm that the curricular content that children learn in school is only a part—and perhaps not even the largest nor the most important part—of what children learn by attending traditional schools. It has been suggested that socialization activities are how children learn to be members of a community and how they acquire critical interpersonal skills such as sharing, patience, self-advocacy, determination, communication, and friendship skills. A concern is that homeschooled children may not receive these opportunities, and that as a result, children who are homeschooled will have a greater chance of growing up too sheltered and that when they reach adulthood they will not be ready to take up the burden of independence and navigate the world on their own. Another concern related to the lack of socialization opportunities is that homeschooling can enable abusive parents to isolate their children and therefore more easily hide evidence of their abuse from others and prevent their children from seeking help.

The homeschooling community responds to fears regarding a lack of socialization experiences in a variety of ways. One argument takes issue with the value of school socialization itself, pointing out that socialization in school can create many negative experiences such as bullying and constant exposure to performance pressures. Homeschool advocates also point to the record-high levels of anxiety and depression among teenagers in the 2020s. Other homeschoolers acknowledge the critical role that socialization plays in children’s lives but point out that traditional schools are not the only places where such experiences can occur. These home educators often create their own small schooling groups or enroll their children in extracurricular activities. Also, with the internet and social media, children and teenagers interact with one another in drastically different ways than previous generations. Most homeschoolers have just as much access to social media as children in traditional schools.

While many homeschoolers will follow a traditional form of teaching in a home setting, those who unschool their children reject a teacher-led education for a student-driven one. Unschooling is a somewhat radical form of homeschooling that is based upon the premise that not only are traditional schools less effective than homeschooling, but that traditional schools are affirmatively harmful because they stifle children’s innate curiosity, creativity, and desire to explore the world around them. Unschoolers consider the education system fundamentally flawed. The hallmark of unschooling families is that they allow the interests of the individual child to determine what content the child will study. Whereas a traditional school would provide the same learning experience to each child in a class—for example, one hour per day of math, science, history, language and literature, physical education, music, and art—if a child being unschooled were especially interested in (for example) spiders, then the child would be encouraged to pursue that interest as far as he or she cared to. The child would read books about spiders, go on nature hikes to find spiders, watch documentaries about spiders, write stories and draw pictures about spiders, study the life cycles and habitats of spiders, and so on. The unschooling parent takes on the role of guide and facilitator rather than lecturer, providing opportunities for the child to explore different aspects of the topic of interest, instead of simply handing out assignments and then correcting them. A core belief of unschooling is that the role of education is to provide space for children to explore what interests them and to help make that exploration happen without inadvertently extinguishing children’s enthusiasm or hijacking it to cover a specific curriculum. According to unschoolers, all too often children arrive at school full of the desire to learn and discover, only to have these qualities smothered by rote memorization, the completion of endless worksheets, or the pressure to perform well on standardized tests. This teaches children that school is an obstacle to learning rather than a forum for discovery, and it can make children dread the thought of even opening a book.

A separate concern often raised about homeschooling is the lack of external oversight and the potential vulnerability of homeschooled children. In 2024, eleven states had no regulations regarding homeschooling and did not even require parents to notify state officials if they intend to homeschool. Most states, however, had at least moderate or high regulations such as requiring that parents administer achievement tests and report scores, or that parents use an approved curriculum. The few statistical studies on the subject present conflicting information about whether homeschooled children are at higher risk for child abuse, but there have been many cases of abused homeschooled children. In states with little or no oversight, it is much easier for abusers to take advantage of the fact that their children are not routinely under the supervision of others in order to abuse and neglect them. There are a number of organizations nationwide, such as the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), and the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), that document and raise awareness of cases of abuse and work to fight them.

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