There was a time, in the United States when homeschooling was illegal. Like families in Germany and other parts of Europe, parents were prosecuted for educating their own.
Actually, the United States Supreme Court has never ruled that homeschooling is legal. Instead, the legality of homeschooling has been dealt with by individual states. Each state has different requirement for homeschooling, ranging from no interference at all, to being highly regulated. However, how did we get to this point?
Historically all Americans started out homeschooling their own. The pilgrims did not get off the boat and immediately build a school. They built homes. Education was something that happened in the course of every day life. It was not until the hardships of life became less hard, that anyone even thought about organized education. When farm life was traded for industrial labor, workers needed something for their children to do, as they could no longer watch over them while working. (Some children also needed protection from child labor.) The first public school in the United States was established in Massachusetts in 1852.
Fast forward 120 years, and people began to question whether or not public schools were really the best thing for their kids. In looking for an alternative, they looked to the past. The modern homeschooling movement began. However, homeschoolers had a long hard fight ahead of them. The school districts prosecuted parents based on truancy and “educational neglect” because the children were not being educated on school grounds.
Anyone who homeschooled their children in the 1970’s and much of the 1980’s were in fact, breaking the law. If you read the stories on the HSLDA website, you will read numerous stories about parents being prosecuted for homeschooling. While homeschoolers still run into the occasional truancy or testing issues, homeschoolers in past decades had it 100 times worse. Some families moved to rural farms and educated their children under the radar to avoid prosecution; other parents served jail time and spent a lot of time and money in court fighting local authorities.
European families are now going through similar trials and children are forcedly being dragged from their homes and put in public schools in “their best interest”. I want to encourage these European families to hold true to your convictions and continue to fight and advocate for your children. You may be losing the battle, but you do not have to lose the war.
Want to know more about homeschooling? Read the
2006 homeschool blog review.