Both the American and Soviet governments knew that building up their respective political systems, their economic prowess, and their international influence required first, as historian David Raleigh writes, “educating the builders.” As a result, soon after the Second World War, American governments and educational experts begawan unprecedented effort to direct the reform of schooling at every level across the country. Doing this, however, required dramatically increasing government and expert (especially administrative) control over schools, privileging this over parental rights and influence. … from roughly 1920 to 1945, the leading lights of American education had wished not only to mold society through schools but also to require that teachers exert tremendous personal effort to adapt to the local needs of their classrooms (as they saw them), even to the point of writing textbooks to suit their own students. In other words, while schools had been moving toward expert control in those heyday years of progressive education and teacher professionalization, they did so with a profound respect for the importance of school and community ties and of teacher autonomy. The much more radical transformation from local to large control that occurred in the 1950s and ‘60s was a different thing altogether. This change was born not out of a lack of interest in local influence but out of a pressing fear that without a nationally overseen education, the next generation of Americans would not be able to defeat the Communists as their parents had defeated the Nazis. And now the transfer of power from ‘lay citizens to elite decision makers in government,’ as Joseph Murray has written, was moving forward far more rapidly.

the family is the primary educational delivery system. … In fact, John Holt responded to the Reader’s Digest article with a letter encouraging the Moores to take their criticisms even further. Many readers, both famous and less so, agreed that the home and family were the best available setting for alternative education. And so parents, not teachers, would have to lead the way.

… we can say with some confidence that while the desire to educate children religiously played a (sometimes highly important) part in a large number of homeschoolers’ decisions to homeschool in the early twenty-first century, the overall motivation of homeschoolers as a group was almost certainly not primarily religious and has grown to be less so over time. As numerous of the NHES (National Household Education Survey) reports have repeated, ‘parents homeschool their children for many reasons that are often unique to their family situation.’ Thus, although a majority of homeschoolers were religious—as were a majority of Americans overall, let us not forget—religiosity did not define homeschooling whether in motivation or demography.

Perhaps most intriguing is data form the ACT college entrance exam on homeschooler performance. The ACT released a report in 2020 that made composite scores from public schoolers, private schoolers, and homeschoolers available over the previous two decades. The ACT’s main finding was that between 2005 and 2019, homeschoolers’ composite ACT score was significantly above that of public schoolers (and slightly below that of private schoolers): homeschoolers’ average scores have been consistently higher than those for public school students. While private school students scored even higher than homeschoolers, the difference between homeschooled and private-schooled kids was much smaller than between public-school children and homeschoolers.

… The experience of school has changed rapidly in recent generations. Starting in the 1980s, a metrics-obsessed regime took over American education and profoundly altered the expectations placed on children, up and down the class ladder. In fact, it has altered the experience of childhood itself. This era of policymaking has largely ebbed, with disappointing results. Math and reading levels are at their lowest in decades. The rules put in place by both political parties were well-meaning, but in trying to make more children successful, they also circumscribed more tightly who could be served by school at all. “What’s happening is, instead of saying, ‘We need to fix the schools,’ the message is, ‘We need to fix the kids,’” said Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and the author of “Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life.” “The track has become narrower and narrower, so a greater range of people don’t fit that track anymore,” he said. “And the result is, we want to call it a disorder.” … Later in the article: “Rather than wait for changes to come, many parents are giving up on the system altogether. A poll in 2023 found that about one in three home-schooling parents were unhappy with how their schools had educated their children with special needs, prompting them to leave. Parents are also increasingly turning to microschools, essentially learning pods with small numbers of children who can receive more individual attention. “Some of these parents identify as being part of an “unschooling” movement, in which they believe that school has done more harm than good for their children. They may be onto something. A 2016 paper showed that many young adults with childhood diagnoses of A.D.H.D. saw their symptoms improve once they left school and began working in a field that interested them.”

My interest in homeschooling and for that matter alternative schooling —and I was interested in alternative schools before I became interested in homeschooling. My interest in it is that it makes it at least possible for those people who want to give their children a natural, organic, uncoerced learning experience to do so. Not everybody is going to use it that way. People start schools which they hope will be even more coercive than the schools that exist. There are certainly some people who teach their children thinking that they can pound in learning faster than the local schools who were doing it. I don't think many of them stick it out very long because they find out it doesn't work. … I mean if I look far enough down the line I like to think of schools as learning experiment activity centers. Somewhat analogous to public libraries, but rather wider in scope. Places to which people can come if they feel like coming to do the things that they want to do for as long as they want to do them. … I would hope that somewhere we would find a way to call these places something other than schools. Because they're really very fundamentally very different. …We have to understand we're going to probably have to agree to disagree about this. Because nobody who walks into a room believing in some kind of forced learning is going to walk out of the room not believing in it because they've heard me preach this little mini-sermon about it. But I want you to be very clear about where I personally stand. And I should say, by the way, that I suspect that the number of homeschoolers or alternative school people who really agree with me is probably well under 50%. I mean, I think this is a minority even among homeschoolers. You don't have to believe what I just said to be a homeschooler or to run an alternative school. But I'm the one who's sitting up here and that's what I think. …

In 35 randomized control trials in 18 countries, he and other researchers found that when students are allowed some opportunity to take their own initiative, they are more engaged in class and better able to master new skills, they have better grades and fewer problems with peers — and they are happier, too. The effect sizes were often between 0.7 and 0.9, a significant degree of impact. Importantly, the teachers did not need to change the curriculum they taught or alter their disciplinary approach. They just applied a few new teaching practices in the course of their normal lesson. [My emphasis—PF]