Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream with Dixie Dillon Lane (Eerdmans, 2026)

Sure, and the, yeah, and that first, that first, um, you know, four-decade span is a little bit longer than the others, largely because of that source issue.

So, uh, the people between 1950 and 1975, the people that you can find sources on are people who are somehow either forced to be visible or they are protected by something.

So here we have some really important court cases that are used and precedent, um, still.

Um, and we also have people like John Holt and Raymond and Dorothy Moore, um, who were, uh, who were educators, who were not, um, just parents, and Holt was not a parent, but who had education degrees or who were, had platforms, we would say now.

And those people were speaking publicly, and what's super interesting is that homeschoolers heard them.

So when, then I was doing oral history with people who had started in the 1980s, they're talking about the articles that these people wrote in Time Magazine or hearing them on the radio.

Um, so that first period is really a period of reemergence of homeschooling.

I think sometimes when you talk with homeschoolers, um, people like to talk about homeschooling in the 18th and 19th centuries, um, and there was a lot of education done outside of school in those periods.

But what I'm talking about is not exactly the same thing.

I'm talking about a really countercultural movement in the 1950s, um, through about 2000.

And so these were people who were doing something way outside the norm.

You know, in the 1950s, everyone was going to school.

There were historical reasons for that, um, which are in the book that are really interesting, too.

But, um, people were doing something that was not considered normal, so we were, they were sort of creeping along.

It was very private.

It was very private, and it was against the norm.

It was against the institutions we have for education.

Then in the second period, we start to see homeschooling become more public.

So I actually titled that section Back to School [laughs] because here we see homeschoolers Move a little bit away from being anti-school and anti-institutional, and they start organizing and reemerging into the public as they grow in numbers, and they start engaging with institutions like schools and churches and government.

And then, um, in the third section, which we're, you know, is right before where we're living now and I think, uh, probably we still live in it, is when homeschooling really becomes a minor educational norm in America.

And, uh, it starts growing.

Well, this whole time it had been growing quite rapidly since about the 1980s.

But, um, it starts becoming something that is no longer practiced by people on the edges of society, but is now demographically really normal.

Um, and that's a, that's a huge change.

Yeah.