The hidden roots of homeschooling
Christianity Today
July 24, 2026
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Illustration by Christianity Today
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Dixie Dillon Lane, Skipping School: A History of Homeschooling and How it Went Mainstream (Eerdmans, 2026)
Currently, more than 5 percent of kids in the United States are homeschooled, including some of historian Dixie Dillon Lane’s own children. In Skipping School, Lane traces the homeschooling movement from its “hidden” roots—driven largely by fear of government education reforms during the Cold War—to its status as a “lasting, representative fixture of the American educational landscape.”
According to Lane, homeschoolers are motivated by a strong libertarian streak regarding their children’s education. She argues that, after World War II, Americans chose homeschooling mainly because they rejected the idea that the state should override parental control in education. This libertarian impulse—rather than reactions to public school desegregation or a desire for religious indoctrination—has been the main driver.
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Today, Lane notes, homeschooling cuts across class, religion, and race (with the movement surging among African Americans since the COVID-19 pandemic). She writes, “When a parent both understands himself as a homeschooler and retains dominant influence over the child’s day-to-day schooling, this is homeschooling.”
Skipping School blends history, sociology, and memoir. At times the book reads like an accessible treatment of the homeschooling movement since 1950, and at other times like an apology for this approach to K–12 education. But Lane’s professed goal is to write a history that homeschoolers themselves will recognize—and in that, she succeeds.
Michael S. Roth, The Student: A Short History (Yale University Press, 2023)
“There are many ways to be a student,” Michael Roth writes, “but at their core, this book argues, is developing the capacity to think for oneself by learning from others. The student learns to be more free.”
Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, one of the United States’ premier liberal arts colleges, traces the history of the student from Confucius to the present, but much of his understanding of learning centers on the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who said that education is “freedom from self-imposed immaturity.” Education, Roth suggests, is not about “being trained to one thing so that you sell that skill to another or fit a part of yourself into someone else’s enterprise.” Nor are students “excellent sheep,” the phrase the writer William Deresiewicz used to describe college enrollees who care about getting good grades only for the purpose of landing lucrative careers. He argues such pursuits are not about freedom but about slavery. To illustrate this point, Roth draws heavily on the educational experiences of Black voices such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Roth’s work raises thought-provoking questions for Christian higher education. His Enlightenment-inspired vision for the liberal arts suggests that students should rise above attempts to shape them through religious belief, tradition, or political correctness (he also criticizes “woke and cancel culture”). Roth is aware of the Christian roots of much of American higher education—he even uses Jesus’ disciples as a historical model of what it means to be a student—but he clearly prefers the nonsectarian model begun by Thomas Jefferson initiated at the University of Virginia, where “independent judgment” could “properly resist external coercion.”
Jonathan Zimmerman, Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Yale University Press, 2009)
Few images evoke as much sentimentality and nostalgia as the little red schoolhouse. Americans from all backgrounds have projected their ideologies onto these iconic structures. In Small Wonder, Jonathan Zimmerman—one of our best historians of education—explains why these structures have captured the American imagination. He argues the little red schoolhouse reminds us of home, community, the lost values of individualism and self-reliance, and even patriotism; they are, as Zimmerman puts it, “an emblem of the nation.”
In 1913, there were 212,000 single-teacher schools in the United States, serving half of all schoolchildren. By 1960, just 1 percent of students attended a single-room school. Zimmerman traces this decline, focusing on how primarily white school districts moved toward consolidation and modern educational facilities.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Zimmerman’s book is the section he titles “Memory.” In the 20th century, Americans used the little red schoolhouse as a symbol for many causes: westward expansion, anti-Catholicism, educational reform, the importance of the three R’s, progressive child-centered learning, American democracy during the Cold War, and the “small is beautiful” movement. (Dixie Dillon Lane likely knows that homeschoolers often invoked the little red schoolhouse.) Zimmerman points out that these nostalgic uses do not always reflect the reality of what happened in the actual schoolhouses but argues that such nostalgia is fundamentally human: “We all tailor the past to serve the present.”
John Fea is Senior Fellow in History at the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin.
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