The home education movement is here to stay. That’s a good thing for everyone
The other day I met a group of friends for a pint at our old Oxford watering hole. Talk turned to family. Half of the group were young fathers. One was educating entirely at home, while the others were tentatively supplementing school or daycare with home education on the side. Nor were they the only ones: “The so-and-sos are also homeschooling now”, “Our church is running a co-op”, “I couldn’t believe how many children showed up at the event the other day”, and so on.
These men and their families have little in common with the old stock prejudices about homeschooling in 1980s America. You know the ones: semiliterate preppers who set their tin-fed children to work building bunkers, oiling guns, and generally waiting for the chance to play Patrick Swayze in Red Dawn. My friends are outdoorsy, but they are also bookish — not exactly Rocky Mountain survivalists.
Now, Oxford is a bubble, a hothouse teeming with all sorts of exotic creatures nowhere else to be found. One might therefore be forgiven for thinking that the typical British home educator is just another rare bird tethered to a dreaming spire. But as it turns out, home education is on the rise just about everywhere in Britain: in Scotland and Devon, in London and Lancashire. And despite the American origins of the contemporary movement, interest is surging well beyond the Anglosphere, too. From Portugal to Latvia, wherever the practice is legal, it is growing.
The numbers are impressive. In the late 2000s, home-educated children were, statistically, almost negligible in Europe. France and England could each count about 10,000, or fractions of a percent of the school-age population. Poland had even fewer: officially, as few as 50. As of this 2025–2026 school year, 54,000 children in Poland and some 130,000 in England are being educated at home.
The case of France is telling. By 2021 the figure had reached 73,000 homeschoolers. Macron’s regime, evidently alarmed, then declared that home education was no longer a right, but a privilege, one to be conceded only for debilitating medical conditions or Olympian athletic aspirations. He has succeeded in depressing the number to 30,000, but estimates are that some 100,000 French children would be educated at home this year if they were so permitted. Such families have been wrestling with the French state over education since the 1800s and will certainly outlive the Macron regime.
This kind of growth — which COVID catalysed, but did not spark — would be impressive in any field. It is all the more so in the notoriously sluggish education sector. The motivations are similar across borders. Safety plays a role. American-style shootings and French Islamist-style decapitations are hardly reassuring, of course, but on a day-to-day basis the chronically chaotic classrooms, the lack of discipline, and the bullying are enough to move many parents.
Even more important in motivational terms is the continent-wide failure of state schools to deliver on three essential promises implicit in education: the formation of character, the cultivation of the intellect, and the transmission of culture. One or the other may be missing, and parents will find a way to cope. With two or three compromised, radical choices and the sacrifices they entail become much easier to face.
First, Millennial and Gen Z parents know from experience how schools cultivate sullenness and self-absorption, cynicism and self-loathing, arrogance and entitlement. These character traits are habitually stilled through curricula, pedagogy and the ambient peer-to-peer proliferation of dehumanising media content. Second, they occasionally read a book written prior to 1930 and are astonished at the author’s clarity of thought and expression. By comparison they feel like intellectual cripples. Something has clearly gone wrong, badly so. Third, in cultural terms, many recognise that they have been cut off from their own literary and artistic heritage or else taught to scorn and mock it. Their schoolroom encounter with their country’s past has not been “warts and all” so much as “just the warts”.
These parents have lived enough under the existing systems to see that schoolroom orthodoxies of materialism and libertinism lead to personal and societal collapse. They see no reason their children should serve the same 13,000-hour sentence that they served. PISA scores, daily interactions, and scandalous reports from our venerable institutions reinforce the impression. Legions of online education commentators point out the flattening effect of illusory and abstract “transferable skills” peddled by schools, which are in fact totally divorced from both the rich and rigorous liberal arts tradition of the humanities and sciences and from the lived practices of master-apprentice formations in the truly skilled trades. The anti-bureaucratic “you can just do things” spirit takes hold, a love of their homeland and their country’s futures kicks in, and they look for alternatives. Very often they do so in prayer.
Clearly more people agree with something like that background diagnosis than adopt the radical choice of home education as a remedy. It is always a challenging undertaking. It demands sacrifices that are impossible for many. It is true that this all but forgotten practice, once an upper-class luxury, is far more accessible now, such that some of its most ardent partisans are from low- or median-income families. But it is never going to be the norm for the majority.
Nonetheless, it matters to us all, and, parents or not, home educators or not, we should defend it against paternalistic state encroachment. Why? The best analogy I can think of for this comes from that dark chapter of American history known as the Prohibition.
Before 1920, America could boast countless small breweries and pubs in the English, Irish, and German traditions. Many families made beer or wine at home. Then, in a misguided attempt to address some of the antisocial consequences of mass urbanisation and industrialism, the activists behind the Eighteenth Amendment summarily destroyed this flourishing ecosystem. It was only industrial-scale breweries that could survive — for instance, by repurposing equipment to produce chemicals.
Thirteen years later the government admitted that it had failed. But the little guys had no capital to reestablish their little-guy breweries. The big producers did, and this time had no competition. Thus the great names of mid-century mediocrity rose to dominance: Bud, Coors, and so forth. Thin, insipid and soulless, these are the beers that earned America her reputation for unpalatable brews.
Homebrewing, for its part, remained subject to punitive fines for decades and so was virtually nonexistent. It was only in 1978, in what was perhaps the greatest achievement of the Carter Administration, that it was federally liberated. States followed. A homebrewing subculture emerged over the next twenty years as a satisfying protest against the government-enable beer cartel. Hobby shops started carrying the requisite equipment. In time, suppliers dedicated exclusively to homebrew equipment started popping up. Charlie Papazian’s quirky Complete Joy of Home Brewing (1984, but now in its fourth edition) became the homebrewer’s Bible. It was even a sophisticated hobby for university students tired of frat-house keg-stands of “Natty Ice”, a beverage often cheaper than water and about as delicious as its name suggests.
At no point has homebrewing been a majority phenomenon. Homebrewers did not even make up a large minority of American beer drinkers. But, by trial and error, and increasingly to the delight of their families and friends, many of these plucky pioneers did manage to produce some fine beers. Many Americans discovered for the first time that beer could be a serious and palatable beverage, after all. In the late 1990s and early 2000s something even more interesting happened. Many homebrewers decided to leave their day jobs and make a go of it professionally. The explosion of microbreweries and brewpubs over the last twenty-five years is a direct consequence of the preceding twenty years of restored domestic liberty. By now, many Americans who have never interacted with homebrewing have favourite beers that originated in somebody’s cellar. While tasteless beer giants still dominate, they have lost over a tenth of the market to such innovators. Mainstream supermarkets and liquor stores are full of a seemingly endless variety of local and artisanal brews. This was nothing short of a revolution.
If it is thanks to homebrewing that the Yankee tippler can now slake his thirst with something other than watery industrial effluent, it is thanks to homeschooling that he has the choice to educate his children with something other than watery pedagogical effluent. For his palate he has the choice of artisanal porters, Trappist-style ales, IPAs, lambics, lagers; for his children he has the choice of private schools, unabashedly and recognisably religious schools, secular charter schools, homeschooling, home-ed co-ops, or indeed, should he wish, state schools.
The story of American homeschooling parallels homebrewing almost exactly. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a combination of state-level truancy laws and satisfactory standards in both state and private schools amounted to a homeschooling Prohibition. Laws were liberalised from the 1950s onward — just in time to collect dissidents from a school system that, by the late 1970s, was very evidently failing.
Throughout the 1980s, homeschoolers amounted to mere fractions of a percent of American children. But that was already enough to influence the foundation of schools and co-operatives around the country. Fringe educational pluralism turned out to be a driver of more mainstream reform. The new category of charter schools (which in turn inspired Gove’s free schools) followed in the early 1990s. In that decade the number of homeschoolers hit 1 per cent, and with that threshold, it reached a sort of inflection point. The ecosystem was large enough to begin sustaining a number of curriculum publishers, conventions, and local support groups. Since then over a thousand new private schools have been founded, too, many striving to recover the older “classical education”. Spurred in part by Protestant competition and by Catholic homeschoolers, hundreds of Catholic schools that had long followed mainstream drift began to rediscover their own educational purposes. You could call it a movement.
Just like the homebrewing revolution, home education never aimed to be the affair of a majority, nor did it need to be. It did not even need to be a large minority. It just needed to be allowed to exist. The few bold or courageous, crazy or clear-sighted parents who undertook it needed the freedom to do so, to take education into their own hands, to reclaim it from the mediocre state monopoly or private-sector cartels that were failing their children. They needed the chance to remind us what excellence could be like. Perhaps their radical witness reminded others of the order of subsidiarity: parents have the responsibility and the privilege of educating their own children. They may entrust a school with the task, and so delegate it, but their delegation is not an abrogation. The courage seems to have proved infectious enough to change the way millions of parents and teachers approached education in brick-and-mortar schools.
In time, we can expect courageous home-educating families to have a leavening, even revivifying effect on our currently moribund school sectors
Of course, not all homeschooling parents succeed. The freedom to excel also implies the freedom to fail. That is a risk. But many do succeed. And how! Homeschoolers now regularly win university bursaries and scholarships for undergraduate and higher degrees. Many universities now send recruiters to homeschooling conventions. The once-fringe movement has matured enough to draw in millions of children. Today, almost 7 per cent of American children are homeschooled. That is double the number in Catholic schools and almost as many as are in private schools of any kind. In other words, it is huge.
Europe, where mainstream academic performance only began sinking decades after America’s, is not far behind. Countries like England, France, and Poland have by now hit the 1 per cent threshold that America hit during the quietly pivotal 1990s. It is safe to say that home education has arrived. Provided that we defend it against the Macrons of the world and reject unreformable state education monopolies, home education is here to stay.
That is a good thing for everyone. In time, we can expect courageous home-educating families to have a leavening, even revivifying effect on our currently moribund school sectors. They just need the freedom to do it. If recent history is any indication, we will soon see on European shores not only a mature, flourishing and destigmatised home-ed milieu, but also more accessible private schools, a revival of charter-style projects, and a spiritual renewal in existing religious institutions.
One of the homeschooling dads I met at the pub, when asked how it was going, first smiled and said only, “It’s great”. After a pause he added with a wider smile, “And it gets better every day.” That’s something to which we should all raise a glass.
