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.

Injecting ideas into the discourse is incredibly powerful. John Maynard Keynes famously described the power of idea injection: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

Is the fulfilment of these ideas a visionary hope? Have they insufficient roots in the motives which govern the evolution of political society? Are the interests which they will thwart stronger and more obvious than those which they will serve? I do not attempt an answer in this place. It would need a volume of a different character from this one to indicate even in outline the practical measures in which they might be gradually clothed. But if the ideas are correct — an hypothesis on which the author himself must necessarily base what he writes — it would be a mistake, I predict, to dispute their potency over a period of time. At the present moment people are unusually expectant of a more fundamental diagnosis; more particularly ready to receive it; eager to try it out, if it should be even plausible. But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.