This past summer, the “unschooling” trend took TikTok by storm, with videos of parents describing their various methodologies garnering millions of views. A lesson- and curriculum-free homeschooling style that claims to ensure a child’s education is structured around their own interests, unschooling centers around parents attempting to create teachable moments through everyday activities, such as doing chores and going to the grocery store. While proponents of the practice argue that letting children take charge of their own learning will allow their interests to “naturally present themselves,” those who oppose it say that unschooling could be a way to “cover up a subpar learning environment.”
Regardless of the actual efficacy of unschooling, it is undeniable that such practices are uniquely possible in the US. In Germany and Sweden, for instance, homeschooling is illegal, while in France, homeschooling is heavily regulated and requires government authorization. By contrast, in the US, homeschooling is legal in all 50 states. 11 states don’t even require a notification of intent to begin homeschooling a child, while only 10 states require parents who intend to homeschool have “any educational qualifications whatsoever.” Only nine states “require that all homeschooled students be assessed” for their learning. In 14 states, “parents may homeschool without being legally required to provide instruction in any given subject.” This lack of homeschooling regulation, largely stemming from decades of conservative activism that has increasingly begun to spill into public schools in recent years, raises worrying signs for the protection of children in the US. To combat unregulated homeschooling, a new messaging structure which counters the inaccurate framing of education as a parental rather than children’s rights issue must be adopted, setting the stage for the implementation of policies that actually safeguard children, rather than leaving them vulnerable to neglect and abuse.
The state of homeschooling in the US wasn’t always this unregulated. When modern homeschooling began in the early 1970s, it was seen by left-wing educational reformer John Holt as a way to avoid the “rigid instruction of public schools.” To the general public, it was a largely “strange” practice well outside mainstream society, and was usually considered illegal. This began to change throughout the 1970s and 80s, as a series of court decisions that were generally decided in favor of homeschooling parents led many states to deregulate the practice. In the most well known case, Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Supreme Court held that the state of Wisconsin could not compel three Amish fathers to send their children to public school beyond the eighth grade on religious grounds, ultimately causing states to “revise their compulsory attendance rules.” Around this time, evangelical Christians, fearing the indoctrination of their children by secular public schools, also began to homeschool in large numbers. They would eventually grow to dominate the homeschooling movement, making up 90 percent of homeschooling families in the US by the late 1980s and spearheading the rise of the homeschooling lobby.
In fact, the homeschooling lobby has been primarily responsible for the steady deregulation of homeschooling in the US throughout the late 20th century. The most influential of these organizations, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), is a Christian organization founded in 1983. Since then, it has grown to encompass over 100,000 member families, become the primary advocate for the modern homeschooling movement, and worked to systematically challenge virtually any semblance of homeschooling regulation. The HSLDA has largely succeeded in preventing parents from facing any accountability over how their children are educated or cared for. This is a reflection of a philosophy termed by Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet as “parent rights absolutism,” in which the right of parents to decide how their children are raised is taken to the extreme.
The HSLDA has prevented even basic laws protecting homeschooled children from passing in the name of parental rights. A 2004 bill in New Jersey which would have required parents to notify the state prior to beginning homeschooling and made homeschooled students take the same assessments as public school students was blocked by backlash from HSLDA families. A 2009 New Hampshire bill which would have required annual tests for homeschooled students was blocked as well. The HSLDA also frequently works to limit the ability of child protective services to protect homeschooled children, including by helping parents litigate against child abuse investigations. ParentalRights.org, an organization founded by the HSLDA, has fought for a constitutional amendment which would establish, among other things, that issues of parental rights be subject to strict scrutiny in the courts, further expanding the control parents have over their children by significantly raising the standard the government must meet to justify any law which might be used to protect children from parental abuse.
Because of this advocacy, homeschooling in the US frequently leads to the coverup of child abuse. In Illinois, where parents don’t even have to provide notification before pulling their child out of school, an 11 year old was kept at home for over a year, where “he was beaten and denied food,” before welfare workers finally intervened. A report into six Connecticut school districts between 2013 and 2016 found that 36 percent of students who were withdrawn for the purpose of homeschooling “had been the subject of at least one prior accept report” of “suspected abuse or neglect.”
Thus, it is time to move beyond parental rights as the be-all and end-all. Groups like the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CHRE) are already working to ensure more stringent protections for the rights of children, developing a new framework of advocacy based around the protection of children by the government, rather than the protection of parents from any government intervention. It is this framework, then, that will ultimately provide for much-needed homeschooling regulation across the US to better care for children.