The history of the rise of home education as an organized modern American movement can be traced to the year 1983. That was the year that The Teaching Home magazine emerged to sound the virtues of home education. It was the year of the first gathering of state home school leaders to plot a national strategy for the defense and propagation of Christian home education. It was the year that Dr. Raymond Moore’s book, Home-Spun Schools: What Parents Are Doing and How They Are Doing It, began to receive wide distribution. It was also the year that the Home School Legal Defense Association was founded by an aggressive and visionary young attorney named Michael Farris.
For some, home education was a response to a perceived crisis in government and private education, but for many, especially the leaders of the movement, home education was no mere reaction, but an affirmation of fundamental biblical principles regarding both the content and methodology of Christian discipleship and training of children. Furthermore, home educators insisted that their movement was not an innovative new approach to schooling, but the revival and improvement of an historic approach to training leaders.
Home education was, after all, the original method of education. From the patterns and precepts of Scripture, it is clearly a God-blessed method of education. It seems reasonable to assume that over the course of history, more of the world’s population have been home educated than all of the people who were primarily educated in government and private schools combined and then multiplied by a factor of one hundred. (Think about it.) Historically, a significant percentage of our nation’s leaders (some of the most articulate and best-educated men in history) were privately educated at home by their parents, through self-study and with the aid of private tutors. As David McCullough points out in his latest book, 1776, a common denominator of the generals who began the war with George Washington and ended the war with him, is that none of them had a “formal” education outside their home.
Despite its historicity and track record of success in our own nation, the rise of the modern organized home education movement was met with tremendous hostility during the early 1980s and well into the 1990s. Nearly a century of statist educational philosophy, compulsory school attendance laws, and evolutionary education methodologies had brainwashed the nation into believing that education must be regulated by the state in order to “protect children from harm.”
The first wave of modern home educators (the “trailblazers”) found themselves under attack from three different groups:
First, they were under legal attack from government statists in the form of lawmakers, social workers, school superintendents, psychologists (serving as “expert witnesses” in trials), leftist legal groups, and judges who sought, at best, to restrictively regulate home education, and at worse, to criminalize it. (Under the able leadership of Michael Farris, then president of HSLDA, the enemies of home education have been, and continue to be, repulsed. I am thankful to have played a very small role as an attorney on the staff of HSLDA, where I served as Director of the National Center for Home Education.)
Second, home educators endured constant ridicule and harassment from extended family, friends, and even strangers who believed that home education was destructive to the child’s proper socialization, financial well-being, and job potential.
Third, home educators were under spiritual attack within their own churches, primarily from pastors with children in government schools and Christian school organizers (often also pastors) whose credibility and financial stability were challenged by the growing exodus of children from their institutions and the success of home education. Then, like now, home educators endured the worst forms of ostracism, harassment, and name-calling — not from the secularists, but from professing Christians in their own local churches who insisted that educational methodology was neutral or subjective, and who objected to home educators defending their practices from Holy Scripture.
But economic and practical success breeds sympathy. (How we might wish that it was principle which bred sympathy!) By the mid-nineties, the tide began to turn. With the continued decline of government education, the economic and spiritual failure of the traditional Christian school model (often merely a form of baptized government education), with the number of home educators now in the millions and growing, and with the legal rights of home educators being vindicated to a greater or lesser degree in all fifty states, politicians and pastors began to realize that home educators could no longer be dismissed as a merely reactionary or fringe group. Home education was here to stay.
Ultimately, in the face of rapidly growing numbers and unprecedented educational success, Christian school advocates of all stripes were forced to essentially adopt the position: “If we cannot wipe them out, let’s sell to them.” And thus began a wave (much of which has proven to be downright beneficial to everybody) of Christian school advocates supplementing their incomes (and sometimes supporting the notoriously challenging economies of private Christian schools) using home schooler dollars. In recent years, these advocates have become more willing to acknowledge and even cautiously (ever so cautiously) bless home education as long as home educators do not dare to offer a theological justification for their methodological approach to training children.
In the final analysis, the persecution of the early years served to test and refine the thinking of Christian home educators, to facilitate the organization of home educators at the regional and state levels throughout the nation, to develop the political savvy and organizational strength of the movement, to create an environment of political freedom for home educators, and to develop a diverse and rich market of materials such that there is seemingly no limit to the curriculum options available to home educators. Though the movement is diverse and anything but homogeneous, it is distinguished for its emphasis on restoring the culture of Christian family life, a revival of multi-generational thinking and principles of biblical patriarchy, an emphasis on character training and academic excellence, and an emphasis on historic, Hebraic (Deuteronomy 6), relationship-driven training.