History of Homeschooling: How We Got Here and What It Means for Your Family

Most parents who pull their children from school feel like they're doing something unusual, even radical. They shouldn't. The kind of education that happens at home has a longer history than compulsory schooling itself, and understanding that history changes how you think about what you're doing. You're not withdrawing from the norm — you're returning to a much older one.

Here is the story of how homeschooling became illegal, then legal again, and why it's now growing at nearly triple its pre-pandemic rate.

Before Compulsory Schooling

For most of human history, education was simply what happened in families and communities. Children learned by participating in adult life — farming, crafts, trade, religion, local governance. Apprenticeships were formal, but most learning was informal and continuous. The idea that children of a specific age should sit together in a room, separated from adults, and be taught by a designated specialist was not obvious or ancient. It was an invention.

In the UK, compulsory school attendance was not established until the Elementary Education Act of 1870. In the US, Massachusetts became the first state to require school attendance in 1852. By 1918, every US state had compulsory attendance laws. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand followed similar timelines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Before these laws, wealthy families educated children at home with tutors, and working families either incorporated children into productive work or sent them to informal community schools. The romanticized version of this era skips the child labor and lack of literacy for most children. But it's worth noting that the concept of "parent as primary educator" was not controversial until very recently in historical terms.

Ivan Illich and the Critique of Schooling (1970)

The modern intellectual foundation for homeschooling was laid not by a homeschooling parent but by an Austrian philosopher named Ivan Illich. His 1970 book Deschooling Society argued that compulsory schooling was fundamentally broken as an institution — not because individual schools were bad, but because the system itself confused "schooling" (the process) with "education" (the actual thing). Illich believed that schools had become credentialing machines that taught children to equate learning with instruction, and institutional approval with real competence.

His solution was radical — learning networks replacing institutions — and it was largely unimplemented. But his critique seeded the intellectual soil from which the modern homeschooling movement grew. The term "deschooling" itself comes from Illich, though it was later adapted by John Holt to describe the individual decompression process children need after leaving school.

John Holt and the Modern Movement (1970s–1980s)

If Illich provided the critique, educator John Holt provided the practical vision for family-level change. Holt had worked as a schoolteacher and become convinced that traditional schooling damaged children's natural love of learning through fear, coercion, and external control. His books How Children Fail (1964) and How Children Learn (1967) were read widely by educators.

In 1977, Holt began publishing Growing Without Schooling, a newsletter for families actually practicing home education. He used the newsletter to develop the concept of homeschooling as a real alternative — not a stopgap but a principled choice. He coined the term "unschooling" to describe child-led learning without a formal curriculum, and he adapted Illich's "deschooling" to describe what happened to children when they first left the school system: a period of recovery and reorientation before natural learning could resume.

Holt's newsletter connected families who were, at that point, doing something legally precarious. Homeschooling was effectively illegal in most US states through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Parents faced prosecution, custody challenges, and compulsory attendance investigations.

Legalization in the United States (1980s–1990s)

The legal landscape changed through a combination of advocacy, litigation, and political alignment. Two distinct groups drove the change:

Religious conservatives wanted to educate their children according to faith-based values outside of public schools. Organizations like the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), founded in 1983, provided legal representation and political advocacy for these families.

Progressive unschoolers following Holt's philosophy wanted child-led education free from institutional constraint.

These two groups had almost nothing in common ideologically, but they shared an interest in legalizing home education. By the early 1990s, most US states had revised their laws to explicitly permit homeschooling under varying conditions. By 1993, it was legal in all 50 states, though regulations still vary enormously — from Texas (no oversight) to New York (substantial annual reporting requirements).

Homeschooling Goes Mainstream (2000s–2019)

Through the 2000s and 2010s, homeschooling grew steadily but remained a minority practice. US numbers rose from approximately 850,000 in 1999 to about 1.77 million in 2012. The demographic profile diversified — early homeschoolers were predominantly white and religious; by 2010, Black homeschooling families were the fastest-growing segment, often citing concerns about racial bias in school discipline and culturally disconnected curriculum.

Technology accelerated the growth. Online resources, curriculum marketplaces, co-op networks, and YouTube tutorials made homeschooling more accessible. The "cottage industry" of homeschool curriculum publishers (Sonlight, Memoria Press, The Good and the Beautiful, among others) professionalized the market. Khan Academy and similar free platforms reduced the cost barrier significantly.

The Pandemic Inflection Point (2020–Present)

COVID-19 was the largest disruption to formal schooling in history, and its effects on homeschooling numbers have not reversed.

During the pandemic, roughly 5.4 million US students were homeschooled at the peak. When schools reopened, a significant portion of those families chose not to return. As of the 2024–2025 school year, approximately 3.7 million US students remain homeschooled — representing about 6.73% of all school-age children. Thirty-six percent of reporting states recorded their highest-ever homeschool enrollment in 2024–2025, exceeding even pandemic peaks.

The growth is not limited to the US:

• UK: Home-educated children increased from approximately 92,000 to over 111,700 in 2024. Record levels of school absence and a visible "school refusal" crisis are driving new withdrawals.
• Australia: Approximately 45,000 students are registered for homeschooling nationally, with Queensland registrations tripling since 2019.
• Canada: Numbers dipped slightly from pandemic highs but remain elevated at around 63,150 students.

The demographic driving much of this recent growth is notable: families withdrawing neurodivergent children — particularly those with autism, ADHD, anxiety, and PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance) — who found that post-pandemic schools were worse at accommodation, not better.

What History Tells You About Deschooling

Understanding this history matters practically, not just academically. Here is what it should change about how you approach your own situation:

You are part of a much longer arc. What you're doing has deep roots. You are not improvising something untested. Generations of families have figured out how to educate children outside of institutions, and that knowledge has accumulated into real frameworks, real research, and real community.

The deschooling concept has a specific origin. When John Holt wrote about children needing time to decompress after leaving school, he was observing something real: that institutional schooling teaches children to suppress their own curiosity and wait for external direction. Reversing that conditioning takes time. The widely cited "one month of deschooling per year of schooling" rule of thumb comes from this tradition — not from research, but from the accumulated observation of thousands of families who learned the hard way that jumping straight into curriculum often backfires.

The two camps still exist. Modern homeschooling still contains both the structured, curriculum-heavy approach (more common in religious conservative communities) and the child-led, unschooling-influenced approach (more common in progressive and neurodivergent communities). Most families eventually land somewhere in the middle, which means you don't need to choose a tribe before you begin.

The transition period is the most critical part. Whether you came to homeschooling through conviction or crisis, every significant voice in the history of home education — from Holt's newsletters to today's online communities — emphasizes that the first weeks after withdrawal set the tone for everything that follows. Families who rush into structured academics immediately often spend the first year fighting their children over work. Families who take the transition seriously tend to find their footing much faster.

If you've recently pulled your child from school and you're figuring out what the transition should look like, the De-schooling Transition Protocol provides a structured framework for those first six weeks — grounded in the same principles that Holt and later researchers identified as essential to a successful homeschool start.

The Future of Homeschooling

The regulatory direction in many countries is toward more oversight, not less. The UK is actively developing a national register of home-educated children. South Africa's BELA Bill has tightened registration requirements. Several US states have introduced legislative proposals for increased monitoring in recent years.

At the same time, the growth trajectory shows no sign of reversing. The institutional trust in traditional schooling that made homeschooling seem radical has eroded. More families are encountering situations — school refusal, inadequate support for neurodivergent children, bullying without institutional response — that make the alternative feel not just acceptable but necessary.

What was once a fringe practice is now a significant and growing part of the educational landscape. The families navigating it today are building on 50 years of hard-won legal access and practical wisdom.