I Don't Blame You

This morning on our way to co-op, we stopped at a gas station with our two older boys to buy them a very healthy breakfast of Pop-Tarts. The cashier, a woman probably in her early fifties, looked at the boys and asked if they were getting ready to go to school.

“We homeschool,” we told her. “We’re headed to our co-op.”

She didn’t miss a beat. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “In today’s world, I’d probably do the same if my kids were still young. Schools are crazy anymore — not like when we were kids.” Then she told us she has a five-year-old grandchild, and she hopes her daughter decides to homeschool too.

No weird looks. No raised eyebrows. Just understanding — and something that sounded a lot like approval. Approval we don’t need from strangers, but that’s still nice to receive every once in a while.

We talked about it in the car afterward. Because there was a time — not that long ago — when that conversation would have gone very differently.

It Used to Be Different

If you’ve been around homeschooling since the eighties or nineties, you remember. Back then the reaction to “we homeschool” was a raised eyebrow at best and open suspicion at worst. Homeschoolers were the weird ones — the cultish ones, the families who clearly had something to hide. “What about socialization?” wasn’t a genuine question. It was a punchline, delivered with a smirk, and you learned to give your answer and change the subject as fast as politeness allowed.

And it wasn’t just social pressure. In those days, homeschooling occupied a strange legal twilight in many states. The pioneer families — and that’s the right word for them, pioneers — fought real battles: truancy charges, courtrooms, the constant low-grade fear that someone with a clipboard might decide your family was the test case. Organizations like HSLDA were founded in 1983 because families needed someone to answer the phone when the state came knocking. The Supreme Court’s Wisconsin v. Yoder decision in 1972 had cracked the door, but walking through it took a generation of parents willing to be thought strange.

Think about what that required. No internet full of curriculum reviews. No co-ops on every corner. No YouTube tutorials, no Facebook groups with three hundred thousand members trading advice at midnight. Just a mom at a kitchen table with a stack of books, a dad working overtime to make it possible on one income, and a quiet conviction that this was right — held against the raised eyebrows of nearly everyone they knew.

The stereotype had a uniform, or close enough: the denim jumper, the van full of children, the vague sense among the neighbors that something unusual was happening behind closed curtains. Strangers felt entitled to quiz your children on the spot — “do you know your times tables?” — as if your family were a science fair project. Well-meaning friends from church would ask, with genuine concern, whether you were “putting too much on yourself.” Birthday parties came with a side of interrogation. You developed a thick skin or you quit, and most of the quitting happened quietly, in October of the first year.

And legally, it was a patchwork of anxiety. In some states you filed as a tiny private school and hoped the paperwork held. In others you operated in a gray area and prayed nobody tested it. Every new family that joined made the next family’s position a little stronger — which is why the pioneers were so generous with their time, their used curriculum, their phone numbers. They knew the movement survived on hospitality.

The thaw came slowly, then all at once. The internet did what courtrooms couldn’t: it connected the isolated. Curriculum companies grew up. Co-ops went from whispered-about gatherings to waitlisted institutions. By the 2010s, “we homeschool” still raised an eyebrow in some circles — but the eyebrow was starting to look tired, like it wasn’t sure what it was objecting to anymore.

We stand on their shoulders. Every co-op we drive to on a Friday morning exists because somebody in 1987 was willing to be the weird family. It’s worth saying that out loud once in a while, because comfort has a way of making us forget what things cost.

What Changed Wasn’t Us

Here’s the thing the cashier understood without needing a philosophy of education: the schools changed. Or maybe it’s more honest to say the schools were finally seen clearly.

Consider reading — just reading, the most basic thing a school is supposed to teach. For two hundred and fifty years, American children learned to read with phonics: learn the sounds, blend the sounds, read the words. It worked so reliably that nobody considered it a philosophy. It was common sense.

Then the experts arrived. First the “look-say” readers, then whole language — the theory, dressed up in academic jargon, that children absorb reading the way they absorb speech, through immersion rather than instruction. Children were taught to guess at words from pictures and context clues. Correcting a misreading was discouraged as harmful. One of the theory’s founders stated plainly that reading and writing should not be taught at all.

The results are in, and they’re brutal. On the federal government’s own report card — the 2024 NAEP — 69 percent of American fourth graders scored below reading proficiency. Four in ten couldn’t reliably understand a simple text. And the score hadn’t meaningfully moved since 1992. Thirty years. Billions of dollars. Zero progress.

California went all-in on whole language in 1987, watched its reading scores collapse to among the worst in the nation, and eventually spent $100 million to reverse course — after administrators had literally confiscated phonics books from classrooms. Mississippi passed a law requiring systematic phonics and posted some of the fastest reading gains in the country. The method the experts called a “flat-earth view” turned out to be the only thing that ever worked.

And reading is just the most measurable failure. The deeper story is older: an institutional model imported from 19th-century Prussia, designed to manage large groups of children in buildings — to sort and rank them efficiently, not to form them. It was never built for your child. It was built for the system’s convenience, and generations of reformers have been trying to sand down its edges ever since.

This wasn’t an accident of history, either. By the early 1900s, influential voices were saying the quiet part out loud: Woodrow Wilson told an audience in 1909 that “we want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education.” Philanthropy money poured into reshaping schools around social efficiency rather than intellectual formation. The system wasn’t failing at its original mission. In many ways, it was succeeding at a mission you never signed up for.

Even the most famous punchline got studied — and lost. Peer-reviewed research found that homeschooled children display fewer behavioral problems than their conventionally schooled peers. The National Home Education Research Institute found homeschool students scoring well above average on socialization measures. The “what about socialization” era didn’t end because homeschoolers got better comebacks. It ended because the data came in.

Then there’s everything the test scores don’t capture. Parents started asking harder questions about what else the building was teaching — the values smuggled in alongside the curriculum, the social pressures no poster campaign ever fixed, the sheer length of days spent in an environment they couldn’t see into. You don’t need a statistic for that one. You just need to have watched your own child change — or watched a neighbor’s child change — and wondered who was doing the changing.

Then came 2020, and for the first time, millions of parents got to watch the whole thing happen live. Laptop on the kitchen table, camera on, and there it was: the actual content, the actual tone, the actual priorities of the classroom — streaming directly into the home. A lot of parents didn’t like what they saw. Enrollment in homeschooling surged, and here’s the part the system didn’t expect: most of those families never went back.

What exactly did they see? Lessons that moved at the pace of the slowest connection rather than the pace of the child. Curricula that raised eyebrows. And underneath it all, a dawning realization: the thing they’d outsourced — the hours, the formation, the worldview — had been handled by strangers with priorities they didn’t share. For a lot of families, that was the point of no return. Not anger, exactly. Just clarity.

So when the cashier at the gas station says “schools are crazy anymore — not like when we were kids,” she’s not theorizing. She’s observing. And she’s not alone.

The Strangers Have No Faith Argument — and That’s the Point

Here’s what encourages me most about that conversation, and the dozen like it we’ve had over the years: the cashier wasn’t coming at it from faith. She didn’t quote Deuteronomy 6 about teaching our children diligently. She didn’t mention the formation of the soul or the discipleship of the next generation. She just looked at the public system with clear eyes and landed exactly where we landed.

Just common sense.

There’s a theological word for that — common grace — but you don’t need the vocabulary to feel the weight of it. When people of every worldview, and of no worldview at all, start reaching the same conclusion independently, it’s worth asking whether the conclusion might just be true.

And if you’re reading this and you don’t share our faith — maybe you’re one of the common-sense families, here because the schools left you no good options — you’re welcome at this table. We write from Christian conviction, and we won’t hide that. But the door is open. Clear-eyed love for your children is a language we all speak.

This is the great unnoticed story of the homeschool movement’s last decade: it diversified. What began as a largely Christian, largely countercultural phenomenon is now one of the broadest coalitions in American education — secular families, progressive families, families who left for academic reasons, families who left for safety reasons, families who left because a laptop on the kitchen table showed them something they couldn’t unsee. The motivations differ. The direction doesn’t.

The signs are everywhere once you look. Co-ops with waiting lists. Hybrid programs where public schools — yes, public schools — now court homeschool families with part-time enrollment and extracurricular access. Curriculum is a thriving industry. Politicians in both parties compete to sound like the most pro-homeschool voice in the room. Whatever this is now, it isn’t a fringe.

That’s why the raised eyebrows stopped. It’s hard to call something “weird and cultish” when your neighbor does it, your coworker does it, and the lady at the gas station wishes her daughter would do it. Movements stop being fringe when the fringe turns out to have been early.

For the Mom in the Thick of It

But let me talk to you — the one reading this between lessons, or late at night after the kids are down, with the doubts doing their quiet work.

Because here’s the honest part: the culture’s approval is nice, and I won’t pretend this morning didn’t lift us a little. But it can’t be what holds you. Strangers will still misunderstand you sometimes. Family members will still ask the questions with an edge. There will be mornings when the math lesson goes sideways, when the toddler dumps the manipulatives across the floor for the third time, when you close the bedroom door and wonder whether everyone else has this figured out but you.

On those mornings, I want you to remember two things.

First: you were early, not weird. Everything the culture is now discovering — the reading failure, the institutional mismatch, the quiet exodus — you saw first. You didn’t follow a trend. You saw clearly before it was fashionable, and you acted on it when it cost you something. That’s not weirdness. That’s discernment.

Second: the only approval that ultimately matters was never the cashier’s, and it was never the skeptic’s either. “Train up a child in the way he should go” wasn’t a suggestion contingent on polling data. The pioneer generation didn’t fight court battles so we could be popular. They fought so we could be faithful. Our battle is different — not for legality anymore, but for endurance. For the long, unglamorous, kitchen-table faithfulness of showing up again tomorrow.

And here’s something practical for the doubtful days: stop evaluating yourself like a public school. You are not a public school. You don’t need thirty desks, a bell schedule, or a standardized test to prove that learning happened. Faithfulness on a Tuesday looks like phonics at the kitchen table. It looks like the read-aloud you almost skipped. It looks like apologizing to your son after you lost your patience during math — because that apology taught him more about repentance than any curriculum could. The small, unrecorded, unglamorous stuff is the education.

And zoom out far enough and the whole thing inverts. Your children won’t remember whether you finished the math book by May. They’ll remember that you were there — that the person who taught them to read was the same person who bandaged the scraped knee and prayed over the nightmare. Nobody outsources that and gets it back. Presence is the curriculum underneath the curriculum, and it’s the one thing no institution can deliver.

You didn’t choose the easy thing. Anyone who’s done a full week of it knows that. You chose the hard, unfashionable, deeply personal work of forming your own children — mind, character, and soul — with your own hands. The world is starting to notice that the ones who chose it aren’t crazy.

They’re just ahead.

And a growing number of strangers in grocery lines and gas stations can see it too.

I keep thinking about the cashier’s grandchild. Five years old. Somewhere there’s a little boy or girl whose grandmother stood in a gas station this morning hoping her daughter makes the choice we made. Ten years ago that sentence would have been unthinkable. Today it’s small talk. That’s how far this has come — and how far it still has to go.

And that’s why we homeschool.