Embraced by parents such as Thomas Datwyler, homeschooling is an outgrowth of a movement with roots in the 1970s, when educational theorist John Holt became an advocate of school reform. Born in New York City in 1923, Holt served on a US Navy submarine during World War Two and was part of the the World Government Movement in the 1950s, traveling extensively in Europe. He taught at the Colorado Rocky Mountains School, followed by a number of preparatory schools in the Cambridge and Boston communities.
By the late 1960s, Holt was a visiting lecturer at institutions such as the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Education. In addition to writing and lecturing, he established a Boston office of Holt Associates, which considered social issues from an educational perspective. This led to the bestsellers How Children Fail and How Children Learn, which together have sold more than two million copies since being published half a century ago.
Holt’s foundational claim as a former self-professed conservative, traditional teacher, was that the rote learning conducted in formal classrooms was oppressive and had a central aim of making students compliant as workers. He advocated that parents liberate their kids from a form of coercion that impinged on Constitutionally grounded private rights.
As Holt put it, “a person’s schooling is as much a part of his private business as his politics or religion,” adding that the majority of what he had learned in life had not been taught in the traditional sense. The learner should, in every sense, be invested in and responsible for their own learning, under the encouragement and guidance of their parent. Starting in 1977, followers of Holt’s philosophy and method of “unschooling” had a way to connect and refine these ideas through the newsletter “Growing Without Schooling.”
It’s worth noting that in the early years of homeschooling, the practice was legal in every state, but regulations could be extremely onerous, including a half dozen instances of states requiring that parents obtain teachers’ licenses to homeschool. Holt’s organization provided practical assistance, from legal aid to mediation with educational boards, in ensuring institutional accommodation with homeschoolers. By the 1980s, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians had joined the fold, as they wanted the right to teach religious and cultural perspectives that were not emphasized or permitted in the traditional classroom.
Beyond this, many parents who chose to homeschooling did so, not for religious or pedagogical reasons, but for practical, situation-specific reasons. They might be reacting to their children being bullied within the local school, or to low levels of educational attainment across the school district.
These various factors led to the popularity of homeschooling growing rapidly, with the National Household Education Survey (last undertaken in 2015-2016) finding that the number of homeschooled students had risen from 850,000 in 1999 to nearly 1.7 million by 2016. During this timeframe, the percentage of homeschooled kids nationwide rose from 1.7 percent to 3.3 percent.
That same survey found that 80 percent of parents questioned reported “a concern about the environment of other schools” as primary to their reason for homeschooling. Some 67 percent listed “a desire to provide moral instruction” as a primary reason, with 51 percent citing “a desire to provide religious instruction.” For 14 percent and 20 percent of parents respectively, their decision centered on kids having “a physical or mental health problem” and “other special needs.” For parents like Thomas Datwyler, a key driving ethos is simply that being involved in the education of their children and helping them through their journey is very important to them.