Homeschooling

Homeschooling is the practice of educating children at home under the direction of their parents or guardians, in place of attendance at a public or private school. In the conservative account it is not a fringe preference but the default expression of a deeper claim: that the family, not the state, holds primary responsibility for forming the young. The contemporary movement, which grew from a few thousand families in the 1970s to millions of children across the English-speaking world, unites two strands of conservative thought — the defence of religious liberty and the case for parental choice in education.

The practice raises a recurring question in conservative political theory: where does the legitimate interest of the state in an educated citizenry end, and where does the prior authority of parents begin. Conservatives answer that the burden of proof lies with the state, and that compulsory-attendance laws must accommodate the family’s right to direct its children’s instruction.

Key Takeaways

• Homeschooling is parent-directed education conducted in the home rather than in a state or private school, and it rests on the conservative principle that parents hold primary authority over their children’s upbringing.
• The modern movement draws on both religious-liberty arguments and the school-choice case for breaking the state monopoly on schooling.
• Conservatives treat the family as the first educator and read regulation of home instruction as a test of how far the state may displace parental judgement.

History And Context

State-organised compulsory schooling is a nineteenth-century innovation; before it, home and tutorial instruction was ordinary. The modern revival began in the United States in the 1970s. The educator John Holt, originally a reformer who hoped to improve schools from within, concluded that institutional schooling could not be repaired and urged parents to withdraw their children and teach them directly. His 1981 book Teach Your Own became the movement’s founding manual; Holt had coined its name for the practice, “unschooling”, in his 1977 newsletter Growing Without Schooling.¹

A parallel and larger stream was religious. Evangelical and traditional Catholic families, concerned that state curricula conflicted with their faith, formed the bulk of the early movement and built the legal-advocacy organisations that pressed for recognition. The decisive legal anchor was the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), in which the Court held that Wisconsin’s compulsory-attendance law, applied to Amish families who declined to send their children to school past the eighth grade, violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Chief Justice Warren Burger’s opinion held that the parents’ interest in the religious upbringing of their children outweighed the state’s interest in two additional years of formal schooling.² Though Yoder concerned the Amish specifically, conservatives read it as authority for the broader principle that parental and religious liberty constrain the state’s educational reach.

The Conservative Position

The conservative case for homeschooling rests on three claims. The first is the priority of the family. Conservatives hold that children are entrusted to parents, not to the state, and that the parental right to direct upbringing and education is a natural right that the state recognises rather than grants. On this view the family is a mediating institution standing between the individual and the government, and home education is its educational expression.

The second is religious liberty. Where state curricula advance moral or metaphysical claims that contradict a family’s faith, conservatives argue that compelling attendance forces parents to subsidise the contradiction of their own beliefs. Yoder is the constitutional expression of this concern.

The third is the wider school-choice argument. Milton Friedman contended in Capitalism and Freedom (1962) that the state’s legitimate interest in a minimum level of education does not require it to run schools directly; the same end could be met by funding families and letting them choose, breaking the public monopoly and exposing schools to competition.³ Homeschooling is the most complete exercise of that choice, and it sits alongside school vouchers in the conservative programme of returning educational decisions to families rather than to administrators.

Differing Positions

Critics, drawn largely from the political left and from teachers’ professional bodies, argue that unregulated home instruction can leave gaps in a child’s knowledge, weaken socialisation, and shield abuse or neglect from detection. They press for testing, registration, and curricular oversight to protect the child’s own developing interests, which they hold can diverge from the parents’. The dispute therefore turns on whether the relevant rights-holder is the family or the individual child, and on how much access to education the state must guarantee. Some libertarians, by contrast, fault even modest registration requirements as an unwarranted extension of the role of government into the home.

References

1. John Holt, Teach Your Own: A New and Hopeful Path for Parents and Educators (New York: Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence, 1981).
2. Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972).
3. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), ch. 6, “The Role of Government in Education”.