Skipping School

“Skipping School

 

By Dixie Dillon Lane

 

Eerdmans, 216 pages, $28.99

 

Homeschooling families are a challenging group to study. Researchers have scant records to draw upon when trying to understand homeschooling, a legal gray area for much of the 20th century. And despite its legality, since the early 1990s, in all 50 states, national statistics offer at best an incomplete picture. Each state has its own definition for what counts as homeschooling; some states don't report homeschooling numbers at all.

 

Given the obstacles, Dixie Dillon Lane is well aware that "Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream" is an ambitious project. Building on her doctoral research on homeschooling in Los Angeles County, Ms. Lane is careful to note the limits of existing studies and the superfluity of misinformation surrounding her topic.

 

Relying on a rich archive of court transcripts, surveys and interviews of Southern California homeschool families across multiple decades, Ms. Lane -- a historian and associate editor of Hearth & Field -- is uniquely situated to offer this textured account of parent-led education in America after World War II. She has been a witness to and participant in "a resurgence of long-held American beliefs in parental influence in education." Rigorously researched, "Skipping School" will interest historians of education and general readers curious about the place of homeschooling in American life.

 

Ms. Lane's history includes several cases that provided legal precedents on homeschooling. One of the earliest, from the 1950s, concerns the Turners, a Southern California family that resembles those of many homeschoolers today -- parents uncomfortable with a lack of parental and local control in education. The Turners were ordered by a Los Angeles County judge to enroll their children in a conventional school on grounds that the parents did not have adequate teaching credentials. When the Turners appealed, the Supreme Court dismissed the case. They were not allowed to homeschool. (To this day there remains no comprehensive federal legislation on homeschooling.)

 

For the next several decades, a wide range of cases across multiple states ended with varied rulings, as state laws were often vague regarding homeschooling's legal status. In 1983, J. Michael Smith and Michael Farris, lawyers and evangelical homeschooling fathers, started the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which aimed to enshrine the legality of homeschooling in all 50 states. A decade later their goal was attained. Yet as recently as 2008, a California court of appeals ruled in an abuse case that homeschooling (except by a "credentialed tutor") was illegal in the state. The public outcry was tremendous: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the head of California's Education Department and the Los Angeles Unified Public School District all joined the HSLDA in support of the legal status of homeschooling. The court, Ms. Lane reminds us, ended up "effectively reversing its previous ruling." By that point, public opinion -- the mainstream, as the author argues -- was clearly with the homeschoolers.

 

In contrast with such high-profile legal cases, Ms. Lane highlights a variety of more typical approaches to homeschooling. Since the majority of families featured in the book are Christian, these case studies also help address the extent to which religious reasons factor into the choice to homeschool. Some Catholic families turned to homeschooling after Vatican II, the 1960s council responsible for modernizing the Catholic Church, led to concerns that even local parochial schools were losing their conservative moral values. One Protestant couple objected to the exclusive teaching of evolution in public schools; after homeschooling their own children in the 1980s, the couple went on to found a popular homeschool resource center that now offers classes online.

 

"Skipping School" also considers the many homeschoolers who are nonreligious. Ms. Lane describes a family that "unschooled" its neurodivergent daughter in the 1990s and notes that now nearly half of homeschooling families do not count religion among their reasons for choosing home education.

 

In the secular philosophy propounded by John Caldwell Holt and Ivan Illich beginning in the mid-20th century, children should receive an education through self-directed learning outside of school settings, which, Holt and Illich argued, promote anxiety and squelch creativity.

 

 According to a Pew survey published in 2005, common motivations for homeschool families include "concern about the school environment" (83%) and a desire to provide "moral instruction" (75%). Ms. Lane argues that "since the 1990s homeschooling has grown in demographic and motivational diversity until it looked very much like the rest of America leading up to 2020."

 

Then the Covid-19 pandemic spurred an unprecedented growth in homeschooling. The Census Bureau reported that, in the fall of 2020, more than 11% of households with children between the ages of 5 and 17 were homeschooling at least one child. This number excludes those enrolled in virtual public or private school. It's a staggering thought: Nearly six years ago, one in 10 American families took on the responsibility of home education.

 

Going mainstream has hardly rendered homeschooling uncontroversial. Tara Westover's memoir, "Educated" (2018), and the television documentary series "Shiny Happy People" (2023-25) give examples of homeschooling being used by abusive parents to isolate and brainwash their children. Ms. Lane takes issue with how these horrific experiences have been presented as arguments against all homeschooling. "There is little real evidence," she argues, "that homeschooling either causes abuse or correlates with higher levels of abuse than other schooling practices."

 

While the return to in-person education after the pandemic led to a decline in homeschooling rates, recent analysis indicates that rates are settling above prepandemic levels. Whatever one thinks of homeschooling, it persists as a force in the American education system.

 

The problem Ms. Lane raises thus also persists: "How can we understand homeschooling on a national level when it is a practice first and foremost characterized by family privacy?" This question extends beyond the historical and social bounds of "Skipping School." Ms. Lane has taken a rigorous approach to answering it, and those who continue in this line of inquiry would do well to follow her example.

 

---

 

Ms. Schrag is a writer and editor based in Tampa, Fla.” [1]

 

1. Scholars In Residence. Schrag, Nicole.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 23 July 2026: A13.