I did school online before it was cool.
As a homeschooled high schooler in the late 2000s, I took math, literature, and French classes online with homeschoolers from all over the country. Zoom was still a decade in the future; instead, our live classes used a combination of real-time text-based chats and group calls on a platform that allowed for whiteboard and audio but no video. (Students and instructors also communicated via asynchronous tools like message boards and email.) These classes allowed me to remain homeschooled yet pursue deeper and broader academics than what I could have learned from my parents alone.
In the earliest decades of the modern homeschooling movement, such classes would have been unimaginable—not only because the technology for them didn’t yet exist, but because homeschooling’s dubious legal status made such connection and visibility more risky than it was worth. Yet by the time I graduated from high school in 2010, online classes offered for homeschoolers by homeschoolers abounded.
Dixie Dillon Lane’s new book Skipping School: The History of American Homeschooling and How it Went Mainstream narrates this transformation of homeschooling from educational fringe to educational norm. Lane argues that homeschooling began as an anti-school counterculture, but by the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, homeschooling was so normalized and accepted that it appeared to many families as a viable and attractive alternative to public schools’ online options during lockdown.
Unusually for books on homeschooling, Skipping School is written for both scholarly and general audiences—precisely because Lane herself straddles the worlds of academic researcher and homeschooling parent. Countless books about homeschooling have been written by homeschoolers themselves, most offering encouragement and know-how, some recounting complex narratives of achievement and hurt. A smaller but still substantial body of work approaches homeschooling from an academic perspective, using historiographic and/or sociological methods to understand this educational phenomenon (e.g. Milton Gaither, Homeschool: An American History; Robert Kunzman, Write These Laws on Your Children; James G. Dwyer and Shawn F. Peters, Homeschooling: The History & Philosophy of a Controversial Practice). But Lane’s work draws on both forms of expertise, that of a trained historian and that of a homeschooling parent who is currently “in the trenches” herself. This unique combination of perspectives lends credibility to Lane’s goal of approaching homeschooling with both sympathy and scholarly rigor.
Skipping School is also unusual in its complex mix of research methods. Rather than relying on a single methodology (e.g., historiography or ethnography), Lane draws on both pre-existing studies of homeschooling and her own original research via interviews and archives. Although the book is not primarily a legal history, she spends considerable time unpacking several landmark cases regarding homeschooling. These cases mark the beats of her historical narrative, as both the courts and the wider public gradually come to accept the legitimacy of homeschooling; the cases also provide a context for unpacking controversial topics such as race and child abuse, which we’ll return to later in this review.
The history of American homeschooling that Lane offers unfolds in three phases. In Phase One, stretching from the 1950s all the way to the early 1990s, homeschooling was decidedly countercultural, even antischool. The first homeschoolers faced stiff opposition from courts and legislatures as well as an educational establishment and a general public with little or no comprehension of why and even how parents would choose to teach their own children at home. From this context of widespread misunderstanding and dubious legality emerged the first national spokespeople for homeschooling. John Holt as well as Raymond and Dorothy Moore “had come to believe that school was actively harmful to children. Their eventual turn toward homeschooling was thus not just pro-home but also antischool.” Consequently, these earliest boosters of homeschooling displayed “an ecumenism within early homeschooling that privileged the importance of teaching children at home over any differences of opinion over how or what homeschooled children should be taught.”
Despite increased awareness nationally, homeschooling’s legal gray zone and the isolation it necessitated continued throughout subsequent decades: “Scattered, unsupported, and sensitive to any hint of danger, American homeschoolers did not in any appreciable way form a community or a cohesive moment in 1975.” Yet homeschooling in isolation from other families is nearly impossible to sustain, so families began to get together for informal play groups as well as to share resources and even teaching loads. Homeschooling became still more organized with the 1983 founding of the Home School Legal Defense Association, whose goals included providing free legal defense to member families and working toward full legalization in all fifty states.
These early forms of organization marked the transition to Phase Two of Lane’s history, in which homeschooling was not so much countercultural as postinstitutional. As the visibility and organizational structure of homeschooling grew, “To begin homeschooling in the 1990s was to join a movement, not to start one.” Increasingly in the 1990s and beyond, homeschoolers left their literal homes and began to make use of a wide range of educational and social resources. These included resources specific to homeschoolers, like co-ops, academies, and homeschool proms and graduations; community resources like libraries, museums, scouting, youth groups, and community college classes; and even public schools themselves. Homeschoolers participated in these larger institutions in creative and extensive ways, even as they continued to insist that educational control ultimately remain in their own hands. In Lane’s view, “homeschoolers exemplified a major trend in early twenty-first century America: the development of unforeseen ties among certain minority social groups based on a belief that the private sphere could enhance the public good without submitting to institutional control” (emphasis original). In this way, the postinstitutional phase of homeschooling is part of a broader movement in American society as a whole, in which both support for and direct opposition to institutions (such as schools and churches) give way to a more ambivalent stance.
The arrival of the Internet further expanded homeschoolers’ opportunities, allowing for networking across geographic lines as well as access to academic resources like my online classes and new virtual private and public schools. Thus, when the federal government began formally tracking homeschooling in 1999, homeschooling had already begun its rapid growth, and this continued as homeschooling numbers doubled over the course of the 2000s. In Lane’s words, “No longer defined by standing against the institutions of American education, [homeschooling families] had instead become postinstitutional.”
This second phase might have continued indefinitely into the twenty-first century—were it not for the Covid-19 pandemic. By 2020, homeschooling was not only completely legal but widely accepted. This became abundantly clear when quarantine measures radically destabilized traditional schooling, leading a shocking number of families to begin homeschooling instead. “Modern American homeschooling had never been more accessible, more normalized, or more attractive,” Lane explains. “As a result, the number of homeschooling families in the United States more than doubled during the summer [of] 2020.” According to Lane, homeschooling had become such an accepted educational option that “normal” families readily turned to it as a preferrable alternative to the struggles of pandemic schooling. As a result, as Phase Three begins, homeschoolers are less White, less religious, and less countercultural overall than they have been historically. In fact, homeschooler demographics in the 2020s largely reflect national averages rather than the stereotypes that still persist in the public imagination.
Lane’s book is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on homeschooling (from both insider and outsider perspectives), not only because it is the most up-to-date history of American homeschooling available but also because it provides important context to clarify debates about two difficult topics related to homeschooling: race and abuse. Race is an inescapable factor when thinking about homeschooling, not only because homeschooling has been historically a predominantly White movement, but also because the same arguments for legalizing homeschooling—parental authority and local control—have also been advanced in favor of school segregation. As a result, concerns about government over-regulation of homeschooling can sometimes lead homeschool advocates to argue against federal intervention even in cases of desgregation. But not Lane. Her moral stance is clear and uncompromising:
The need in justice to deny the wishes of influential local, white parents regarding segregation is an important part of the story of the loss of parental control over schooling nationwide. Local control and parental influence do not always a just or effective education make.
For Lane, while parental authority and local control are important, enduring values in American education, they do not overrule the demands of racial justice.
Not only does Lane refuse to back down on the importance of racial justice, but she also undercuts the purported connection between homeschooling and school segregation. She notes that she has not found evidence that early homeschoolers were motivated by a racist desire to avoid integrated public schools, though she does not rule out the possibility that some were. Of the early homeschooling pioneers she profiles, one family is African-American—showing that African-Americans were present, if relatively few in number, even from the beginning of the homeschooling movement. And she repeatedly points out that in the summer of 2020, African-American homeschoolers increased even more dramatically than homeschooling rates in general, as longtime concerns about academics and disciplinary practices combined with the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement to result in 16 percent of African-American families homeschooling. All of these points together produce a more complex picture of the relationship between race and homeschooling.
Just as Lane does not shy away from addressing concerns about race with both data and moral clarity, so too with another difficult topic: child abuse. As the broader public’s awareness of homeschooling itself has grown, so too has awareness of neglect and abuse among some homeschooling families, including those featured in high-profile memoirs like Tara Westover’s Educated and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, as well as the Duggar family (of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting). Such case studies have provided ample fodder for antihomeschooling scholars, yet Lane points out that they do not cite any further evidence to demonstrate that homeschoolers are at greater risk of abuse than other children are; for example, there is no reason to assume that homeschool parents are any more likely than other conservative Christian parents to use corporal punishment in potentially abusive ways. The conclusion Lane draws in this matter is cautious and carefully worded, and therefore worth quoting at length:
Of course, child abuse is highly underreported, making any statistics on the matter difficult to trust; but so far there seems to be little, if any, evidence to set homeschoolers aside from conventional schoolchildren in this area….
As several researchers (including myself) noted at the time [when one highly critical study was published], what available research there is suggests that there is no appreciable difference in abuse rates between homeschooling and other families. There is little real evidence that homeschooling either causes abuse or correlates with higher levels of abuse than other schooling practices…. Without in any way minimizing the abuse that is present in some families, homeschooling or otherwise, it is important not to exaggerate the situation among families more generally, as this can lead to other harms through excessive regulation or restriction of freedoms.
In other words, we must absolutely deal with abuse wherever it is found; but we must not undermine the legitimate freedom of American families to educate their own children at home in order to root out a danger that is more imagined than real.
Lane goes on to suggest that “homeschooling’s long-term reputation as fringe, radical, or countercultural” leads to greater suspicion of homeschooling as a convenient cover for abuse: “Thus, stories of abusive families who also homeschool fit into the general sense that homeschoolers stand outside of cultural norms and thus are likely to be less trustworthy with children.” And she demonstrates that the surprising normalization of homeschooling in 2020 did not prevent ongoing media negativity toward homeschooling, e.g. the Washington Post series “Home School Nation” and the Amazon Prime series Shiny Happy People. Overall, Lane emphasizes that abuse and neglect are real problems for some homeschooling families, as they are for some traditional-school families, and that homeschoolers and the public generally agree on the need to protect children, even as they often disagree about from whom children need to be protected. This nuanced position is a welcome breath of fresh air in a debate that often features more heat than light, and I hope both homeschooling researchers and homeschooling advocates will be able to build on it to chart a healthy future for all homeschooled children.
Though Lane’s contribution to the history of American homeschooling is substantial, Skipping School did leave me wanting more in a couple of ways. First, I had hoped to learn more about what post-pandemic homeschooling looks like, especially in comparison with the homeschooling of the 1990s and 2000s that I experienced firsthand. In fact, this is one reason I was particularly excited to read Lane’s book, since it is the first in-depth academic treatment of post-pandemic homeschooling that I am aware of. Hopefully the coming years will see more studies of this latest phase of the homeschooling movement, perhaps building on Lane’s contention that homeschooling has now become an accepted part of the educational mainstream.
More substantively, I kept wanting Lane to engage more fully with the philosophical underpinnings of the broad homeschooling movement. Specifically, central to Lane’s thesis is that the wide social acceptance of homeschooling stems from a more general valuing of parental rights and localism in education. Reflecting on families who began homeschooling during the pandemic, she observes,
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—and they did this without living outside of mainstream American society and culture in other ways. Their belief that parents should have authority over their own children’s education was thus not an abnormal one from a forgotten time past. Rather, it was a belief that a wide swath of twenty-first-century Americans had come to intuitively accept—without anyone really noticing until the schools locked down.
Yet the ideas of parental authority and educational localism are underdeveloped conceptually, to the point that Lane references the technical term “subsidiarity” without ever defining it. I would have appreciated even a short discussion of the meanings of localism and parental rights and the various ways these values take shape in American education generally. For example, if I withdraw my student from the public school up the street in order to enroll her in an online homeschool academy, is that localism or not?
Yet these very shortcomings demonstrate the value of Lane’s book in raising new and interesting questions about American homeschooling. Lane herself calls repeatedly for more and better research on homeschooling. For, in the words of Lane’s conclusion, “Homeschooling is poised to remain a resilient and adaptable part of the American educational mainstream.” Therefore, understanding the changing landscape of homeschooling will continue to be essential for understanding Americans’ attitudes toward schooling, family, localism, and so much more.
Image Credit: Bernard Pothast, “Motherly Love”
