Chapter 3: Homeschooling And Compulsory State Schooling

Homeschooling is of course and always has been the original form of education, except for those unfortunate children—now increasingly rare— who spend their childhood in institutions. Any attempt to give an account of its history must focus instead on its antithesis: compulsory state schooling. Homeschooling only becomes a phenomenon in the context of (almost) universal education in institutional settings provided by or at least regulated by the State.

John Locke, the “Father” of the American Constitutional order, gives us a useful place to start a discussion of homeschooling. Locke had no great confidence in the institution of schooling, even in the elite form of English grammar schools. The priority in education, he insisted in On Education (1697), should be put upon “Virtue [which] is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world, and if lost in a young man is seldom recovered.” There were more dangers than advantages to sending a boy to school, since “it is preposterous ... to sacrifice his innocency to the attaining of confidence and some little skill of bustling for himself amongst others by his conversation with ill-bred and vicious boys when the chief use of that sturdiness and standing upon his own legs is only for the preservation of his virtue.” Against the argument that schools were valuable because they taught the young how to get along with peers, Locke pointed out that