Did Homeschooling in America Start with Catholic Parents?

In the fall of 1974, new “language arts” textbooks appeared throughout the school system in Kanawha County, West Virginia. They fostered a new value system, different from traditional morality. 

Parents were upset that open-ended questions like “When is it okay to steal?” were suggested as teacher discussion topics in schoolbooks. Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, with its discussion of the rape of white women as an act of insurgency, was in the new curriculum. Also, phonics had suddenly disappeared—and since Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955, concerned parents had understood that meant their children were going to be seriously cheated.   

Parents did not know how to protect their children from this abrupt change of direction in one of the major institutions of society. Frustration turned to anger: there was a school boycott, there was a strike, there were shots fired. It was an ugly opening battle in the culture war.

At a conference organized by the fledgling Heritage Foundation in January 1975, I urged parents to consider homeschooling their children as an alternative. That was a radical thing to say at the time. Homeschooling was not even legal yet in most states. In some states, homeschoolers stayed indoors during school hours so as not to attract attention. 

Yet by 2010, one out of every 25 American children of school age was homeschooled. During Covid, homeschooling rates for all children spiked at about 11 percent of American children and have never gone back to pre-Covid levels. In May 2020, about 6 percent of all Hispanic children were homeschooled, as were 6 percent of white children and 3 percent of black children.  

How did homeschooling go from being weird and illegal to being normative, multiethnic, and socially acceptable?

That’s the question Dixie Dillon Lane, an adjunct professor at Christendom College, answers in her new book, Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How it Went Mainstream (Eerdmans, 2026). The book deserves to become a standard: academic-level research, which makes it a reference work of longtime value, coupled with being very readable—exactly what might be expected of a homeschooling mother of four who happens to have a Ph.D.!

Every parent should read it—homeschoolers because it’s a ready source of ammunition (statistics and studies) to help you give an account of yourself when challenged, and non-homeschoolers because it will help you to understand mainstream homeschooling in America today.

Lane focuses particularly on California, in whose public schools she grew up. Some early horror stories came from there, and California courts have never yet explicitly permitted homeschooling—though by 2008 its legislature and governor treated it as “implicitly legal.”

The fight to homeschool began as far back as 1971, in Oswego County, New York. Devout Catholic parents Cecile and Jerry Gracey had a conscientious objection to a new required sex ed curriculum in the public schools. They also found their local parochial school to be unacceptable.  So, they took their children out of school and taught them at home. The state charged them with child neglect, and their school-age children were removed and put in foster care. The story went worldwide.

The case was eventually dismissed. Attorney Jim McKenna, who defended the Graceys, was working for The Heritage Foundation in 1975. He understood that with the collapse of parochial schools and the large-scale invasion of secular humanism into the public schools, conscientious parents needed an alternative. And it wasn’t just Catholic parents. The Supreme Court’s 1972 Wisconsin v. Yoder decision established that compulsory school attendance requirements violated the right of Amish parents to the religious upbringing of their children. 

Interestingly, homeschooling was first embraced by the Left: dissenting priest Ivan Illich was decades ahead of his time with his critique of modernity. He published Deschooling Society in 1971. John Holt, another man of the Left, went further and started his Growing Without Schooling newsletter in 1977.

In the early 1990s, a friend of mine went to a homeschool meeting and was surprised to discover that several of the otherwise very liberal countercultural moms strongly deplored abortion. She asked them why and was told, “Because it interferes with Karma—those souls are supposed to be reincarnated!”

And that’s pretty much the point of homeschooling, isn’t it? That parents should be able to choose the moral, intellectual, and cultural formation of their children.  

Most phenomena that go from being weird to being normal in our current society are not things conducive to long-term happiness and civic virtue; but homeschooling is. Currently, the right of parents to educate their children at home is secure. But elections—even school board ones—have consequences. As John Philpot Curran said in 1790, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”