A left-wing education critic and a conservative pastor arrived at the same conclusion from opposite ends.
The modern homeschooling movement emerged from two ideologically opposed sources that converged on a single practice. John Holt, a former teacher and education critic, published How Children Fail in 1964, arguing that conventional schools suppressed natural curiosity by prioritizing compliance and memorization over genuine learning.1
Raymond Moore, a conservative Christian educator and former U.S. Department of Education official, arrived at a similar conclusion through different reasoning. His research, summarized in Better Late Than Early (1975), argued that formal schooling before age eight or ten was developmentally premature and that families should educate young children at home.2
Holt coined the term "unschooling" in his magazine Growing Without Schooling, launched in 1977, the first homeschooling periodical in the United States. His audience was progressive parents who wanted to preserve their children's autonomy. Moore's audience was religious families who wanted to protect their children from secular influence. The two communities rarely interacted, but they built the same legal infrastructure.3
In 1980, homeschooling was illegal or ambiguously legal in most U.S. states. By 1993, it was legal in all fifty.
The Home School Legal Defense Association, founded by Michael Farris in 1983, litigated cases across the country to establish parents' right to educate their children outside the public school system.4
The U.S. National Center for Education Statistics estimated that approximately 1.7 million students were homeschooled in the 2020-2021 school year, a number that rose significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The figure represented roughly 3.3 percent of the school-age population.5