Homeschooling in the United States

Abstract

The number of homeschooling families in the United States has been growing at a steady rate since the early 1990s. Attempts to make sense of homeschooling-including research-are inherently political. These attempts are, therefore, highly contested. It is impossible to provide an agreed-upon definition of homeschooling, much less a precise number of families that homeschool, why they homeschool, or what the learning outcomes of that homeschooling might entail. Instead, homeschooling is best understood as a set of educative practices that exists in and between institutional schooling and family life. As families and schools evolve and change, so will the meaning and significance of homeschooling.

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Subject: Educational Politics and Policy, Educational Theories and Philosophies, Education and
Society, Education, Gender, and Sexualities, Educational History
Online Publication Date: Feb 2019 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.407
Homeschooling in the United States
Kyle Greenwalt

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education
Summary and Keywords
The number of homeschooling families in the United States has been growing at a steady
rate since the early 1990s. Attempts to make sense of homeschooling—including research
—are inherently political. These attempts are, therefore, highly contested. It is impossible
to provide an agreed-upon definition of homeschooling, much less a precise number of
families that homeschool, why they homeschool, or what the learning outcomes of that
homeschooling might entail. Instead, homeschooling is best understood as a set of
educative practices that exists in and between institutional schooling and family life. As
families and schools evolve and change, so will the meaning and significance of
homeschooling.
Keywords: homeschooling, compulsory schooling, curriculum, intensive parenting, school choice, public education,
religion and education
Introduction
In 2017, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics
(NCES) published a report about the state of homeschooling in the United States
(Redford, Battle, & Bielick, 2017). Drawing upon a nationally representative set of data,
the report found that the number of children who are homeschooled in the United States
had “increased from 1.7 percent in 1999 to 3.4 percent in 2012” (p. 5). The total number
of children who were homeschooled at the time of the study was estimated at 1.8 million.1
Other estimates put that number as high as two million, or about 3.8% of children (Ray,
2011).
The trend is clear: more and more children in the United States are being educated in
their homes, away from the taxpayer-supported public schools that have educated a
majority of the school-aged children in the United States over the course of the 20th
century.

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This article seeks to help readers interested in education—not only researchers and
policymakers, but also teachers and parents—make sense of homeschooling as it has
developed in the United States. In particular, it asks what significance, if any, should be
accorded to the finding that at least 3.4% of school-aged children in the United States are
educated in their homes? What can be learned about education from this increasingly
common social practice?
The article will examine these questions in four sections. The first section,
“Homeschooling: Challenges in Defining a Social Practice,” raises questions about how
best to conceptualize and define homeschooling—that is, about how different
conceptualizations impact the empirical research on the topic. The second section,
“Challenges in Narrating the History of Homeschooling in the United States,” looks at the
competing historical narratives of homeschooling and, in particular, what these narratives
have meant for how Americans think about homeschooling and homeschooling families.
The third section, “Sociological Portraits of Family, Gender, and Childhood,” looks at the
most robust line of research on homeschooling to date, examining ways in which
sociological research on homeschooling has connected with the thinking about gender,
the family, and the child in the American context. The final section, “Reskilling the
Individual Through Public-Minded, Community-Based Education,” suggests several
alternative ways to approach the phenomenon of homeschooling in the future and asks
what homeschooling can teach those interested in public-minded, community-based
educational projects.
It should be noted that the goal of this analysis is to ask questions about the phenomenon
of homeschooling in light of contemporary social conditions in the United States. Readers
wishing a comprehensive summary and overview of the literature are referred to other
outstanding work done in the field, particularly by Kunzman and Gaither (2013), which
references work done outside of the United States.
Homeschooling: Challenges in Defining a
Social Practice
Although neoliberalism is a contested term (Apple, 2006), several important features
associated with it are helpful in considering the phenomenon of homeschooling. First,
public goods are increasingly viewed as commodities. The job of the state apparatus is
not so much to directly provide these goods as to create mechanisms for their delivery.
Such public-good commodities—which others would define as “rights”—are delivered
through mechanisms that have come to stress efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and choice.
Education is one such public good that has increasingly been commodified, particularly in
the United States but also around the world.
When viewed from the perspective of an American family that must make decisions about
the education of their school-aged children, homeschooling is thus seen as another
“choice” that has been encouraged or allowed by the centralized state. As such, its

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increasing popularity can be situated alongside other trends in the field of educational
policy in the United States.
As noted, the most optimistic estimates place the number of homeschooled children in the
United States as high as two million, or roughly 3.8% of the school-aged population (Ray,
2011). This number can be put into perspective by comparing homeschooling to other
education “choices” made by American families. For example, the number of children
being educated in the extensive system of private schools in the United States is
estimated at around 6 million, or roughly 10% of the school-aged population (National
Center for Education Statistics, 2018). The number of children being educated in public
charter schools,2 one of the most-discussed educational options in the United States, has
been estimated at 2.8 million, or roughly 6% of the school-aged population (National
Center for Education Statistics, 2017).
At first glance, homeschooling can therefore be viewed as an “option” or “choice” for
families—alongside private schools, comprehensive public schools, and public charter
schools. Increasingly, however, there are “hybrid” options for families that are blurring
these categories of choice. If the main question facing families in the United States could
at one time have been put in this way—public or private?—it can now be seen that there
are many other ways of inquiring into the landscape of school choice.
Since roughly 2000, another policy innovation in the United States has been the online
public charter school—a school which allows students to take a majority of their classes
via the internet.3 California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have led the way in establishing such
online learning institutions. While an exact estimate of the number of school-aged
children attending online public charter schools is not available, one study examining
learning outcomes identified 65,000 students, or 0.5% of the overall sample, who were
enrolled in such schools. These students are educated in their homes—with the
presumption of heavy parental involvement and monitoring—at public expense
(Woodworth et al., 2015). Given that some research has suggested that many online
public-charter-school students were once homeschoolers (though they are now viewed as
public-school students), our idea of what counts as homeschooling will continue to evolve
(Huerta, González, & Entremont, 2006).
How, then, has the literature defined homeschooling?
Jane Van Galen (1988), in one of the earliest and most-cited articles in the American body
of research, defined homeschooling as the instruction of children who “are learning at
home . . . largely because [their] parents feel their views are excluded from the
curriculum or that their children are being inadequately educated in available
schools” (p. 53). Brian Ray (2013), homeschool advocate and researcher at the National
Home Education Research Institute, has defined homeschooling as a “form of private
education that is parent led and home based” (p. 324). Ray goes on to specify that
“because of this, homeschooling does not rely on either state-run public schooling or
institutional private schooling for a child’s education” (p. 324).

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Ideological critics of homeschooling, such as Michael Apple (2000) and Chris Lubienski
(2000), do not generally define what they mean by homeschooling in their work, but they
make clear that they associate it with not only a rejection of public schools, but a
rejection of common civic life. For example, Apple (2000) has argued that “the movement
toward home schooling mirrors the growth of privatized consciousness in other areas of
society” (p. 261). Likewise, Lubienski (2000) has claimed that “for many, home schooling
represents a retreat into individualism after unsuccessful efforts to reform public
education more to their liking” (p. 227).
Finally, the National Center for Educational Statistics defined homeschooling as children
“being schooled at home instead of at a public or private school for at least part of their
education and if their part-time enrollment in public or private school d[oes] not exceed
25 hours a week” (Redford, Battle, & Bielick, 2017, p. i).
These definitions in the research literature can be placed alongside others that come
from American homeschooling organizations—groups dedicated to supporting families in
their homeschooling pursuits. For example, the Home School Legal Defense Association
(HSLDA), an organization founded in the United States in 1983, provides legal counsel
and assistance to homeschool families. HSLDA states that its mission is to “preserve and
advance the fundamental, God-given, constitutional right of parents and others legally
responsible for their children to direct their education.”4Growing Without Schooling
(GWS), a popular newsletter published in print from 1977 to 2001, which now continues
as an online web presence, tells the site’s visitors that it seeks to promote “a flexible,
vibrant, and social way to learn at home and in your community . . . with a nonsectarian,
practical approach to living and learning with children.”5
What do these definitions have in common, and where do they diverge? More importantly,
what do they tell us about the current state of research on the topic of homeschooling?
The article makes three observations in this regard.
First, perhaps because many researchers are influenced by the policy environment and
are interested in how homeschooling compares to other forms of education,
homeschooling is almost inevitably framed as a choice. But as we can see from the
examples of just two homeschooling organizations, HSLDA and GWS, that is not at all
how homeschoolers would describe their educational project. For HSLDA, homeschooling
is not a choice at all but something more approaching a duty to exercise a fundamental
right: in this case, the “God-given, constitutional right of parents” to direct their child’s
education. GWS describes homeschooling as a way of being, or living, with children. It is
an all-embracing way of life that puts learning at the heart of life. Choice, right, way of
being—these terms represents different (though not distinct) discursive ways of framing
the issue. They also represent a range of meanings that are available in seeking to
understand the experience of being a homeschool family.
Second, and following from the first observation, because researchers have often thought
of homeschooling as a choice made by families—and therefore as something that should
be either supported or opposed by the state—much of the research has focused on the

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reasons families give for homeschooling (e.g., Collum, 2005; Mayberry, 1988; Redford,
Battle, & Bielick, 2017) and the efficacy of that choice. That is, it focuses on how
homeschoolers compare to children who are educated in schools (e.g., Ray, 2013; Rudner,
1999).
But as other researchers have noted,6 these approaches to understanding homeschooling
are problematic, for several reasons. When homeschool families are surveyed,7 they are
presented with a discreet and fixed set of reasons for their decision to school their
children at home: religious beliefs, concerns about public-school environments, concern
about the curriculum of public schools, and so on. Most often, such research reveals that
all these factors are important, leaving the assumption that homeschooling is a choice
unquestioned. In addition, attempts to determine the efficacy of homeschooling are
inherently limited. Although there is research showing that homeschooled children in the
United States score at or well above average on standardized tests (Ray, 2013; Rudner,
1999), we do not know how these children would have performed had they attended a
public or a private school. Evaluating the comparative advantage of homeschooling as an
educational choice is simply not possible.
Finally, almost all researchers define homeschooling in opposition to public schooling.
Such dualistic thinking may be helpful for purposes of counting and categorizing, but it
will show decreasing utility as new forms of education and social interaction emerge
(Fields-Smith & Williams, 2009). Online public charter schools are only one example of
the increasing number of ways that the public school system in the United States has
sought to serve homeschooling families.8 Others include the option to participate in
public-school interscholastic sports or to take certain public-school course offerings—in
effect, allowing homeschool children to attend just the courses they would like. Other
school districts offer library space or teacher assistance and guidance for parents
(Johnson, 2013).
In 1971, Ivan Illich’s critique of the institutionalization of education led him to reimagine
a public education that went beyond the struggles that had occupied 19th-century social
reformers, who had largely defined their systems as “public” because they were funded
by taxpayers, free at the point of delivery, compulsory for all, and secular or nonsectarian
in orientation. Illich imagined a time when the image of the “network” would replace that
of the hierarchical “system,” and “public” would mean that life-long education was to be
provided by all and for all—in effect, every person a teacher, every person a student, all
joined in voluntaristic and local communities. Teachers, in this vision, advised learners
and brought people together. They facilitated the learning work of others.
It is not inconceivable that such an approach may yet be realized and that homeschooling
may be on the front lines of just such a transformation.

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Challenges in Narrating the History of
Homeschooling in the United States
In addition to contested definitions in the research about what counts as homeschooling,
there are also debates about its history—that is, its origins and development. For
researchers face interesting choices as they attempt to tell this history and thus diverge
in how they do so. However, despite these divergent paths, there is also a fairly clear and
consistent metanarrative about homeschooling in the United States.
The origins of the contemporary American homeschooling metanarrative are nearly
always located in relationship to the 1960s, a decade that is associated in American
popular memory with protest and reform, particularly as it related to the struggle for
social justice for African Americans and against the United States’ involvement in the war
in Vietnam.9 On the one hand, homeschooling can be understood as part of a liberal-
radical critique of institutional schooling that emerged in the 1960s. On the other hand,
homeschooling can be understood as a conservative response to the voices calling for
reform.
One wing of liberal-radical critique of institutional schooling that emerged in the 1960s
was led by former teachers, who were writing books for a popular audience. John Holt,
the author of such books as How Children Fail (1964) and How Children Learn (1967),
was among the foremost of these writers. Holt and other authors focused on the ways in
which schools discouraged creativity and curiosity by insisting on textbook knowledge
and teacher control, also pointing out the appalling and unequal conditions in some
schools, particularly those in large cities that served students who were fighting gross
injustice in their everyday lives. Such popular educational writing was a bridge between
themes explored by earlier progressives and later researchers, who would examine such
topics as tracking and the conservative ideological basis of much school curriculum in the
United States. Homeschooling can be understood as part of this liberal-radical critique;
Holt himself became an advocate of homeschooling, and his ideas about how schools
stifle learning were shared by many homeschool families.
The conservative response to the reform movements of the 1960s can be linked to several
trends during the 1970s and 1980s, including increasing residential segregation, as many
white and middle-class Americans left the urban core to live in suburban areas; an
Evangelical Christian movement that increasingly used moral language to understand
and engage with social issues, particularly as they related to gender (reproductive
freedoms, workplace equality, and divorce); and an economy that seemed increasingly
dependent on international actors and forces, resulting in the loss of many well-paying
jobs in manufacturing. In its own way, each of these three trends touched on educational
issues, but it is the second trend—the rise of Evangelical Christianity—with which the
increase in homeschooling is most closely associated. Researchers and activists Dorothy
Moore and Raymond Moore, Mary Pride, Gregg Harris, and Michael Farris (a cofounder
of HSLDA) are some of the names often associated with homeschooling as it relates to the

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conservative reaction in the 1970s and 1980s.10 Their concerns were related to the
secular nature of much of the American school curriculum and their belief in the
centrality of the nuclear family to the health of the United States.
It is perhaps wrong, then, to speak of a single homeschooling “movement” in the United
States during the 1970s. Instead, a loose collection of individual families were making the
decision to school their children at home—largely independently of each other. However,
as Milton Gaither (2008) has noted:
By the late 1970s . . . more and more families were deciding against institutional
schooling, increasing the possibility both of conflict with local schools and of
reaching a tipping point that might transform the decisions of a few into a full-
fledged movement. (p. 121)
Most of the research agrees that homeschooling in the United States could not really be
called a movement until some greater degree of political organization had emerged—and
this was to happen in 1983, with the founding of Home School Legal Defense Association
(Stevens, 2001).
There is a clear tension in the research literature between analyses that stress the tactics
of the homeschooling movement and analyses that examine the practices of
homeschooling families. On the one hand, there is little disagreement that from 1983
onward, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA)—along with partnering
groups that produced magazines and curricula for homeschooling parents and sponsored
homeschooling conferences and local associations—was the organizational engine that
made homeschooling widely possible in the United States. Because education is a state
prerogative under the Constitution, efforts to ensure the legal status of homeschooling
largely needed to be undertaken on a state-by-state basis. The HSLDA was central in this
work to legalize homeschooling in each of the fifty states (Gaither, 2008; Stevens, 2001).
During the 1980s, over 20 states passed laws that permitted homeschooling.11
On the other hand, not every homeschool family appreciated the work being done by the
HSLDA, joined the organization, made use of its services, or approved of its political
tactics. Indeed, these two “faces” of the homeschooling movement have had a profound
impact on writing about homeschoolers, as researchers have sought—in ways that are
problematic—to come to terms with its diversity.
The trend of researchers attempting to separate homeschooling families along ideological
lines began with the work of Van Galen (1988), who identified liberal “pedagogues” and
conservative “ideologues” as the “two broad categories of home schooling parents” (p.
54). Such distinctions have continued to be made across the years, and other pairs, such
as “inclusives” and “believers” (Stevens, 2001) and “open communion” and “closed
communion” (Gaither, 2008), have also been proposed. Such categorization has no doubt
contributed to researchers’ interest in the motivations of homeschooling families—with
the apparent goal of determining into which category a family should be placed.

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Interestingly, almost every researcher who has proposed such distinctions almost
immediately forswears them. As Van Galen herself noted (1988):
There is tremendous variation within both of these broad categories. Further,
while parents explain their decision to home school in broad ideological rhetoric,
the actual decision is often triggered by specific and unique circumstances that
also vary widely from family to family. (p. 55)
Gaither (2008) similarly argued that “the distinction . . . is really a continuum” (p. 144).
One wonders what good can really come from the maintenance of such distinctions in
future research—particularly as it comes to understanding the experiences of individual
families who make up the homeschooling “movement.”
As with the practice of defining homeschooling in opposition to public schooling, so too
with the practice of defining one group of homeschoolers in opposition to another. There
is little doubt that the HSLDA and other religiously motivated organizations were the
public face of homeschooling during the 1980s and 1990s. But as a new generation of
homeschooling families in the United States has enjoyed the social and legal freedom to
homeschool, and as public-school districts have increasingly sought to cooperate with
homeschooling families, there is perhaps little need to maintain the relatively crude
distinctions of conservative or liberal, religious or secular, and exclusive or inclusive.
This becomes increasingly clear as we see organizations such as the HSLDA actively
opposing legislation that would make it easier for homeschool families to participate in
public-school events, such as interscholastic sports.12 It is also clear as we examine a
relatively consistent finding across studies: homeschooling families’ reasons for
homeschooling change as their families grow and their children mature, and their
approach to homeschooling equally changes as their families grow and children mature
(Kunzman & Gaither, 2013). In this way, homeschooling parents are little different from
teachers in public schools, whose views and approaches also evolve over the course of
their careers (Feiman-Nemser, 2001).
Sociological Portraits of Family, Gender, and
Childhood
While too much homeschooling research remains beholden to dualistic conceptualizations
—public school versus home school, ideologues versus pedagogues, and the like—and
while it is clear that these distinctions have some grounding in the organizational history
of the movement, it is less clear how well they carry over to the research on individual
families. It is also unclear how useful these distinctions might be going forward, as public
schools and homeschool families find ground on which they might cooperate—or, indeed,
as public education evolves in response to the possibilities new technologies offer for
alternative forms of social communication and support. Indeed, as increasing numbers of
African American families—many of whom hold deep religious convictions—also turn to

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homeschooling, it is increasingly likely that these distinctions will need to be rethought
(Fields-Smith & Williams, 2009).
One strand of the research into homeschooling in the United States has been particularly
fruitful and stands out as highlighting the social benefits that may accrue from
homeschooling research and practice. It centers around sociological research that
examines homeschooling for what it tells us about the contested nature of the family,
gender, and childhood in the United States. Such research tends to eschew easy
dichotomies, or at the very least, it supplements them with a considerable number of
caveats that enrich our thinking.
J. Gary Knowles and the Pull of Autobiographical Narrative
One early example of such work is by J. Gary Knowles (1991), who used ethnographic
research to understand parents’ rationales for homeschooling. Unlike survey-based
research, which requires participants to choose among fixed responses and does not
account for change over time, Knowles used life stories to understand homeschooling
parents in complex and dynamic ways. But he avoided any simplistic equation of
ideological commitment and the choice to homeschool—noting that many parents
“experience conflicts with public schools, but few choose the solution of home
education” (p. 204).
Knowles (1991) found through his life-history interviews that the relatively “early-
adopters” of homeschooling—those who opted for homeschooling in the late 1980s or the
early 1990s—did so in response to their own troubled childhoods: “With the exception of
one home school family, one, or sometimes both, of the parents in every family came from
a disrupted or dysfunctional family” (p. 213). Many of these homeschooling parents had
strong and predominantly negative memories of their own schooling experiences.
Knowles interpreted this to mean that the parents’ rationales were compensatory: they
wished to shield their children from some of the life struggles they had faced in their own
childhoods by building warm, supportive, and nurturing family lives.
These families, the majority of whom were members of conservative Christian
denominations, did reject some of what they saw in public schools, but Knowles (1991)
focused on the ways in which these homeschool parents were grappling with their own
pasts—rather than on fighting ideological battles in the present. These homeschool
parents sought to create more-nurturing learning environments than those they had
experienced, “where pedagogies unobtainable in public schools could be employed” (p.
223). Such parents could easily be categorized as either ideologues or pedagogues. They
were, of course, both—all the while seeking a deeper form of family life than is often
possible when both parents are working and the children are in school for most of the
day.
This last point is important, for Knowles (1991) clearly articulated in his research the
degree to which his female participants—mothers—were the driving force in the day-to-

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day work of educating their children. This is a finding that was considerably expanded
upon by later sociological researchers into American homeschooling.
Mitchell L. Stevens and the Interface Between Religious Belief and
Intensive Parenting
In many ways an exploration about why Christian organizations such as the Home School
Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) came to be the public face of the homeschooling
movement, Mitchell L. Stevens’s book Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in
the Homeschool Movement (2001) also contained remarkable sociological insights into
how Christian definitions of motherhood could be reconciled with child-centered
pedagogies.
Stevens (2001) described a particularly lively discussion with a group of ambitious and
upwardly mobile Christian homeschool graduates in their early twenties, and then asked
his readers to consider whether, despite their “traditionalist trappings,” homeschooling
was not flourishing “precisely because its basic tenets are remarkably in tune with newly
conventional assumptions about American childhood” (p. 180).
Provocatively situating homeschooling in a pedagogical landscape that included the
Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia approaches, Stevens (2001) noted:
In all four approaches, children are assumed to have precocious inner beings
whose individuality must be honored and celebrated. And all four approaches
abandon conventional classrooms in favor of more flexible, less bureaucratic
educational environments that give the individual learner more room. Despite the
various historical eras and social contexts in which they were first conceived, all
these methods have found supportive audiences in a contemporary [American]
culture increasingly enamored of itself. (p. 185)
Stevens noted that even though the Christian understanding that the child is both sinful
and good is superficially different from a child-centered approach which views the child
as inherently good, such Christian views nevertheless align well with a secular language
of self-potential and self-actualization. Homeschooling, in other words, is a practice that
unites Christians and seculars around the importance of intensive parenting practices.
Stevens, like Knowles before him, found that women were doing the bulk of the day-to-
day teaching in homeschooling families. This finding is consistent across the body of
research on homeschooling. Indeed, it is relatively rare in the research literature to find
an example of a homeschooling mother who performs paid employment outside the home.
Stevens (2001) ended his book by questioning the equity of the reproductive labor women
performed in their intensive homeschool parenting: “The high price of raising individuals
is right in front of us, every day . . . especially for women” (p. 196). Yet if homeschool
families, particularly Christian homeschool families—who are the most adamant about the
need for Christian mothers to raise their own children—alert the rest of society to the

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high cost of intensive parenting, then, Stevens felt, they will have performed a valuable,
even “revolutionary” activity (p. 197).
Jennifer Lois and the Emotional Labor of Homeschool Mothers
At its core a book about the “emotional labor” involved in such intensive mothering—and
the strategies used to manage that labor—Jennifer Lois’s (2013) Home Is Where the
School Is: The Logic of Homeschooling and the Emotional Labor of Mothering built on
Stevens’s insights. Seeking to understand not only the overlap between Christian
definitions of the child and family and child-centered pedagogies, Lois considered the
additional dynamic of career-centered feminism. In this way, her book stands at the
pinnacle of sociological research into homeschooling, as it sheds light on the overarching
relationships among contemporary definitions of the American family, childhood, and
femininity.
The intensive, stay-at-home mothering required for homeschooling would seem to conflict
with the career-centered goals of many women in the United States—particularly those
who do not embrace the views about women’s role in the nuclear family that some
Christian organizations espouse. How, then, to explain the spread of homeschooling
among both religious and secular families?
Lois’s (2013) analysis attempted to answer this question by introducing a new set of
distinctions, ones that went beyond earlier categories that had attempted to label families
as either conservative and religious or liberal and secular. Her distinction was between
mothers for whom homeschooling was a first choice and mothers for whom
homeschooling was a second choice.
The logic of this distinction is clear. First-choice homeschoolers would be those mothers
who “always knew” that they would homeschool—often because of their religious beliefs
or because they had experienced profound emotional conflict when it was time for them
to return to the workforce.13 Second-choice homeschoolers would be those who only
decided to homeschool after coming into some conflict with the public school: a teacher
who could not accommodate their child’s needs, for example, whether because the child
faced a particular learning disability or because the child was particularly gifted (or
both).
The categories of first- and second-choice homeschoolers bear some resemblance to the
categories of ideologue and pedagogue in that most ideologues are first-choice
homeschoolers. However, a significant number of secular mothers became first-choice
homeschoolers after experiencing “emotional epiphanies” on the birth of their child. Lois
(2013) described their experiences in the following manner:
Epiphanies, then, serve an important function in the emotional culture of intensive
mothering. For mothers in general, they provide validation that they have made
the right decision. Mothers appeal to their “instinct” and “know” that they have
made the right choice. Homeschoolers relied on the same feelings when it came

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time to homeschool their children. Once they had the stay-at-home epiphany,
homeschooling was just a logical extension of the important work they were doing
as stay-at-home mothers. (p. 52)
Religion is not the central determinant here. Rather, as in Knowles’s (1991) early work,
biography is. The question is how mothering is integrated into a woman’s developing life
narrative as she has her children.
For second-choice mothers, the decision to homeschool is much more difficult, and the
emotional labor required to justify the decision much more intensive. There are no
epiphanies that resolve the emotional conflicts for these mothers. Lois (2013) described
these conflicts with great insight. Noting that second-choice homeschoolers were a
minority of her participants (5 of 24 mothers), she described how these mothers had
stayed home during the preschool years, “but all had planned to send their children to
conventional schools at age five . . . and return to the workforce” (p. 58).
That is not what happened, however, as either a child’s special needs or a husband’s
demands forced mothers to abandon their original plans. As Lois (2013) explained:
At some point their conventional-school choice become unavailable, and they
chose home-schooling as an alternative, which meant extending their commitment
to stay at home with their children. The adjustment was hard on them . . . In
contrast to first-choicers, who fully embraced stay-at-home motherhood, second-
choice homeschoolers struggled with equating the intense love they had for their
children with their commitment to stay at home indefinitely, so their emotions
were often contradictory and problematic. (p. 58)
Lois identified several of the strategies these mothers used to manage their difficult
emotions, such as “savoring” and “sequencing.” In essence, these strategies helped
mothers to put their sacrifices into some type of larger philosophical perspective: “I need
to enjoy the children while they are still young,” or “I’ll have more time to devote to
myself when the children are older.”
Building on the insights of Stevens (2001), Lois’s (2013) work ultimately makes clear how
adding the role of “teacher” to that of “wife” and “mother” may help to reconcile the
competing demands of contemporary American family life. The child can be intensively
parented, and women can claim the title of home-educator as their career, or vocation. In
this way, the costs of such intensive parenting can be borne by women of a wide range of
backgrounds and beliefs—without disturbing or upsetting the gender imbalance on which
such an arrangement is often made.

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Re-skilling the Individual Through Public-
Minded, Community-Based Education
It is social and historical contexts that shape the meanings of any phenomenon as it is
lived out by social actors. It therefore stands to reason that homeschooling will be lived
out differently by different families. Attending to such variation while seeing what is
common or shared across various contexts—from the level of the individual family to that
of the nation-state—gives us a sense of what is educationally possible for a particular
society in terms of its present and future.
This analysis of homeschooling in the United States concludes by addressing three points
that speak to possible futures: first, the relationship between homeschooling and
conventional schooling; second, the family as a site for renegotiating and redefining
labor; and third the historical continuity of homeschooling.
The Relationship Between Homeschooling and Conventional
Schooling
As already mentioned, most researchers tend to define homeschooling in opposition to
conventional public schooling. This, despite the increasing possibility that homeschoolers
and public-school educators can cooperate in a variety of domains—such as courses a
homeschooled child may be interested in taking, the sharing of curriculum resources and
school facilities, and the opportunity for homeschool children to participate in
extracurricular activities.
The notion that there is opposition between homeschool and public school is therefore
flawed. It suggests that homeschool children are “cocooned” in their homes, away from
the diversity and complexity of public life (see Apple, 2000). Although this may be the
case for some homeschool families, the research in no way suggests that it is the norm.
Instead, we can expect that the majority of homeschool families engage their children
with a range of social institutions, including libraries, museums, zoos, places of worship,
and homeschool learning cooperatives. Homeschool children can also, of course,
participate in athletic leagues and fine arts activities, such as community theater and
orchestra.
Compared to a child educated in a conventional school, there is little doubt that a
homeschooled child could conceivably come into a greater amount of positive social
interaction with a wider age range of people. Yet it is important to note that
conventionally schooled children have the same opportunity to learn independently
throughout the summer, when they are not attending school. So, presumably, do children
who are temporarily out of school because of illness, a death in the family, or a family
vacation.

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The fact that both advocates and opponents of homeschooling have tended to exclude
children who are temporarily out of school from their concerns tells us something. It
indicates that too much of the social discourse around homeschooling depends upon
dualistic thinking: right versus left, religious versus secular, home versus school, and,
ultimately, private versus public. Increasingly, researchers interested in studying the lives
of children would be well served by seeking to understand and support the various
networks within which children live, understanding that school will only be one site
where learning takes place.
The Family as a Site for Renegotiating and Redefining Labor
In Home/Schooling: Creating Schools That Work for Kids, Parents and Teachers,
Greenwalt (2016) examined the process whereby social reformers in the 19th century
took hold of an existing institution—the school—and made attendance compulsory. In the
process, they supplanted parents and domestic life—the home—as the primary
educational force for children. This, as such historians as Eugen Weber (1976) have
pointed out, is only one part of a larger historical process whereby the family has lost its
role to other state-regulated actors, who now provide individuals not only with education,
but healthcare, food, water, clothing, energy, and nearly all the other necessities of life.
The contemporary movement toward homeschooling in the United States undoes this
understanding about the ideal relationship between the individual and the state. In its
place, it posits the home as something more than a private space in which the individual
has certain social and biological needs met, apart from any concern with the public good.
It asserts a vision of the home that is not only about consumption but that asserts it again
as a place for production. Indeed, as Milton Gaither (2008) has astutely noted,
homeschooling—along with other trends, such as home birthing, home gardening, and
working from home offices—may be “on the cutting edge of a larger renegotiation of the
accepted boundaries between public and private, personal and institutional” (p. 4).
In the U.S. context, John Dewey and other progressive educators built their projects for
school reform on the assumption that the home was no longer a place where children
could learn—that the home was a curriculum-free space (Dewey, 2001). They thus
unquestioningly accepted the need to pass compulsory schooling laws. Dewey and other
reformers attempted to make social relations in the public schools more educative. Yet
the fact that children are largely compelled to attend public schools—and that in the
American context, teachers’ future employment is increasingly contingent upon children’s
ability to learn in measurable ways—means that the “contradictions of control” (McNeil,
1986) continue to limit what public schools can do. The search for a form of cooperative
and educative community life within schools remains elusive.
Research into homeschooling has demonstrated the potential for a type of home
education that is both cooperative in its form and aims and learner driven in its content
and methods. It has, by and large, also demonstrated the extreme amount of time,
emotional labor, and pedagogical insight that are needed for parents to support this type

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of home education. Because it is largely women who have taken on the role of home
educators, there remain, then, questions about the equity and fairness of home education
as well. Indeed, as Lois (2013) rightly noted, “If the substantial work of homeschooling is
not shared alongside household and caregiving labor, it may deepen gender inequality”
while ratcheting up “the standards for intensive mothering to historically unprecedented
levels” (p. 189).
As long as reproductive work remains largely invisible, unpaid, and undervalued in the
American context, homeschooling will continue to sit at an interesting ideological
crossroads, bringing together both religious and nonreligious families who embody a
countercultural stance toward social relations that are defined in terms of the centrality
of economic consumption and credentialed hierarchies of expertise. Future research
might better explore families in which men are more active participants in their families’
reproductive labor and women are encouraged to pursue their vocational aspirations both
inside and outside the reproductive context (Hochschild & Machung, 2012).
The Historical Continuity of Homeschooling
The section of this article, “Challenges in Narrating the History of Homeschooling in the
United States,” analyzed the challenges of narrating the history of homeschooling in the
United States. One seemingly simple question, however, was left untouched: should
homeschooling be understood as a social practice that is very old or relatively new?
One can argue that state-mandated compulsory schooling is, by historical standards, a
very new social practice—appearing in various places around the globe only about 150
years ago. Compared to the practice of institutionalized schooling, home education can be
considered a very old practice indeed—perhaps as old as the species.
Clearly, the answer to the question depends on how we define education and how we
define home. Both terms are far too contested, both today and in the past, to assert any
simple continuity between the homeschooling of the past and the homeschooling of today.
So while it is very tempting for homeschool advocates to point to “great Americans,” most
notably Abraham Lincoln, who were largely homeschooled, such claims must only be
accepted with many caveats.
Concluding Thoughts
The modern industrial economy, driven by the division of labor, has produced a massive
“de-skilling” of the population in many areas of life: food production, food preservation,
and food preparation are obvious examples, but so are the everyday practices of
childrearing and parenting. The proliferation of books about how to parent makes it
appear that only credentialed researchers can answer questions about how best to raise
and educate a child.

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Yet this de-skilling is being revisited. While we have not seen the “end of work,” we have
seen changes in how both productive and reproductive labor are organized and valued.
The term “downsizing” captures this contestation, as it means both something that
multinational corporations do to their employees and something that families choose to
embrace for themselves.
Much of the research on homeschooling has operated with outdated notions of the
boundaries between private life and public life. It has implicitly situated homeschooling
as a reactive social formation rather than as an emerging trend that potentially aligns
well with the reorganization of gender identities, childhood, and family life—where the
sharing economy, do-it-yourself, and the slow revolution are growing in power.
Researchers have tended to focus on the religious face of homeschooling. They have
produced magnificent works, such as Robert Kunzman’s Write These Laws on Your
Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling. Yet in so doing, they
have also lost sight of the diversity of both the homeschooling movement at large and the
diversity of “conservative” or “religious” homeschooling families in particular. They have
also lost sight of how the economic, social, and technological changes that have produced
the contemporary homeschooling movement are forces with which all families must
grapple.
The social critics John Holt, Ivan Illich, John Dewey, Jane Addams, and others exhibit
many differences in their educational writings. However, several points unite them. These
are worth recalling: Learning is natural and pleasurable. It happens across the life-span.
It happens in a variety of settings, quite often independently of professional teachers,
formal curricula, and instructional best practices. All three persons recognized that
formal schooling is far too often a hindrance to both personal learning and social
progress.
The pursuit of an educative society based on cooperative social relations is a goal that
both homeschool families and public schools could seek to support. Future research must
remain attuned to how this is happening. Research focused on the decisions made by
individual families might instead be turned toward the social forces that afford and
constrain the realization of a socially just and sustainable global society—one in which all
families can thrive.
Links to Digital Materials
The National Center for Education Statistics provides the most comprehensive
demographic information about homeschooling families across the opening decades of
the 21 century.
Number and Percentage of Homeschooled Students Ages 5 Through 17 With a
Grade Equivalent of Kindergarten Through 12th Grade, by Selected Child,
Parent, And Household Characteristics: 2003, 2007, and 2012.
st

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Apple, M. W. (2006). Understanding and interrupting neoliberalism and neoconservatism
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Collum, E. (2005). The ins and outs of homeschooling: The determinants of parental
motivations and student achievement. Education and Urban Society, 37, 307–335.
Dewey, J. (1954). The public and its problems. Athens, OH: Swallow Press. (Original work
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Dewey, J. (1997). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of
education. New York, NY: Free Press. (Original work published 1916.)
Dewey, J. (2001). The child and the curriculum. Mineola, NY: Dover. (Original work
published in 1902.)
Feiman-Nemser, S. (2001). From preparation to practice: Designing a continuum to
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Notes:
(1.) See also McQuiggan and Megra (2017), which has the homeschooling rate at 3.3% or
1,689,726 children (p. 18).
(2.) The National Center for Education Statistics defines charter schools in the following
way: “A public charter school is a publicly funded school that is typically governed by a
group or organization under a legislative contract (or charter) with the state, district, or
other entity. The charter exempts the school from certain state or local rules and
regulations. In return for flexibility and autonomy, the charter school must meet the
accountability standards outlined in its charter. A school’s charter is reviewed
periodically by the entity that granted it and can be revoked if guidelines on curriculum
and management are not followed or if the accountability standards are not
met” (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017). Essentially, a public charter school
can be viewed as a state-sponsored alternative to the local public school.
(3.) The Center for Research on Educational Outcomes defines an online charter school
as “a school which provides the majority of classes (everything except PE, band, or a
similar elective) to full-time students through a computer via the internet. Lessons may
be synchronous or asynchronous. Lessons may consist of videos, live chat, bulletin
boards, or any other common means of electronic communication. But the primary
delivery method must be online” (Woodworth et al., 2015).
(4.) See “Our Mission,” HSLDA website.
(5.) See “Homeschooling and Unschooling Resources,” GWS website.
(6.) See Lois (2013, p. 46) for an excellent critique of research into homeschoolers
motivations. See also the discussion of Kunzman and Gaither (2013, p. 9).
(7.) Problems surveying homeschool families are widely acknowledged across the
literature. Many states do not require homeschool families to register, and there is a well-
founded belief that many homeschool families would refuse to register in any case. In
addition, because of past legal actions that have been taken against homeschool families,
many are wary of completing surveys or otherwise interacting with researchers.
(8.) Given that some school funding in the United States is based on the number of pupils
enrolled in a school, there are, of course, less than noble reasons for public schools to
want to cooperate with homeschool families. In addition, it should be noted that all such
cooperation takes place on a district-by-district, if not school-by-school, basis.

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(9.) These movements, of course, cannot be limited to the 1960s, nor were they the only
movements during this time. I speak here of popular memory of the time, a memory that
gives meaning to the conventional homeschool narrative, depending on whether one
views homeschooling as growing out of those protests or being a reaction to them.
(10.) Readers interested in the historical details as they relate to such homeschooling
“icons” as Holt and the Moores are referred especially to Gaither (2008) and Stevens
(2001).
(11.) As Johnson (2013) noted, this process was not always contentious. Some states had
always permitted homeschooling, such as Oklahoma.
(12.) For example, the HSLDA opposed a bill in the Mississippi State Legislature that
would “make homeschool students eligible to participate in band and sports in public
school.” The HSLDA claimed that the bill would “unreasonably restrict the instructional
options for all home educators in Mississippi.”
(13.) It should be noted that paid maternity leave is not legally guaranteed in the United
States and is denied to workers in many sectors of the economy. Only in 1993 did the
Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) mandate 12 weeks of unpaid leave for mothers of
newborn or newly adopted children.
Kyle Greenwalt
Michigan State University