People we’d meet used to ask the same question about our children, and my answer usually worried them, or at least they usually claimed to be concerned. When they hear the answer to their question, many people get a look on their faces similar, I imagine, to the look they’d get if I said we refused to have our children vaccinated or let them keep rattlesnakes as pets. They would ask where our two youngest children go to school, and I’d explain that we homeschool both of them, and have done so since they were in kindergarten, with the exception of two years early on at our parochial school.

The response varied. A few people say something nice, with some of them telling you how they’d wished they had done so, or wished they could have done so. Some would explain a little defensively why they couldn’t. Most people suddenly furrowed their brows and pursed their lips and declared their concerns about homeschooling, which seem always to be less often about the quality of the education as about the children’s “socialization.”

Although the people who said something nice were almost always religious and conservative, the people with the quickly furrowed brows were either religious or secular, and I was surprised to find out how many seriously religious and politically very conservative people dislike home schooling and jump to tell you so.

Their Apparent Concern

It’s a little disconcerting, their apparent concern for making sure our children fit into the society as it is. There is something both aggressive and unctuous in their alleged concern for my children that really annoys me.

My wife, who is much more charitable than I am in dealing with annoying people, answered them politely, and set about to reassure them by telling them about the homeschooling groups to which our children go several days a week and all the other activities they are involved in. Some seemed satisfied, others clearly weren’t. I resisted the temptation to put my hand on their shoulder, look them in the eye, and ask, “Why is it so important to you that my children be squeezed into the same mold as everyone else?”

I didn’t come to this feeling the usual way. I first heard of homeschooling as a child growing up in a college town in New England, when the only people who homeschooled their children were hippies living on communes in the country or academics and political activists protesting against the regimented and regimenting education “the system” provided for its own repressive purposes.

No one I knew ever blinked at the idea of raising children outside the public school system, and indeed it had the romantic appeal such counter-cultural endeavors enjoyed in those days. It was a little odd, perhaps, but if asked to express an opinion most people would have shrugged and said that it takes all types to make a world, and many would have said something supportive.

If some people wanted to opt out of the system and do things their own way, bully for them. If they wanted to raise their fist against the establishment, three cheers. Thomas Jefferson, by consensus I think our favorite founding father, would have approved. Let, as we heard from time to time by people fond of quoting Mao, a thousand flowers bloom.

Little Platoons and Wild Flowers

Indeed the desire of the counter-cultural types to take charge of the education of their own children seemed a reasonable extension of the kind of liberty we were being taught, in the public school, that America had been founded to protect, and a rational response to the kind of oppressive social control some of the cooler teachers taught (this was a college town, as I said) capitalist society imposed.

One of my social studies teachers expounded the Marxist writer Herbert Marcuse’s idea of “repressive tolerance,” telling us that we were not free even though we seemed to be. In fact, he and Marcuse said, the system itself controlled us through what we thought were free choices. I’m not sure we completely got our minds around that idea, but it reinforced the feeling that the good life was found in opposition to the establishment.

Even then, I think, I and others recognized the importance of what Edmund Burke called the “little platoons” and others later called “mediating institutions,” though the only terms we had for such things were drawn from anarchism. We had a vision of social difference and diversity, which we were taught was threatened by the homogenizing effects of late industrial capitalism, symbolized by white bread and processed cheese.

The good life, the good society, was one in which all sorts of groups — families, clubs, cooperative societies, small towns run by boards of elders — lived the lives they wanted to live in a creative interaction governed by the spirit of living and letting live. Those thousand flowers were wild flowers, whose beauty resulted from their blooming together as they grew up in nature. They would not have been so beautiful, or not beautiful in the same way, had they been chosen  and planted in rows. And not every one would have been would have been chosen.

This is the way even then, if only vaguely, I thought about the family. The family is a good thing in itself, but a vulnerable thing that needs to have a life apart from the state, and forms a great part of the institutions needed to resist the state’s always expanding desire to control and direct more and more of society.

Homeschooling’s Liberal Critics

It was a different world then, I realize: The Marxists I knew were happily married to their first wives, gave their kids curfews and chores, and a few even went to church or synagogue. Thus I was surprised some years later to find the kind of people with whom I’d grown up — the leftists, the intellectuals, the activists, the public-spirited—suddenly alarmed at the growth of homeschooling. I first experienced this surprise when we still expected to send our children to the public schools.

The critics treated it as a threat to the social order and a source of sectarian divisions. Some expressed concern that homeschooled children would find themselves unable to function in a pluralistic society. Many also argued that they would get an inferior education, but that always seemed to be a secondary concern, and grimly amusing coming from advocates of the near-monopoly of a public school system whose failures were beginning to be lamented even by liberal observers.

The critics found themselves so alarmed, of course, because now politically, culturally, and religiously conservative parents were educating their children at home and rejecting the influence of a system in which the critics — so many of them former countercultural types themselves — were heavily invested. It was their system, which they controlled, teaching what they wanted other people’s children to be taught. And, as a Marxist would note, it was a system from so many of them drew their salaries, and they had reason to want that system to have as many students and as exclusive a market as possible.

The homeschoolers were no longer a few hippies and leftists, whose numbers were always going to be small and their influence marginal, and who were reliably leftist anyway. Now the homeschoolers were a growing number of average parents, whose countercultural commitments were of the conservative and not the leftist sort, whose numbers might well increase and their influence grow stronger, particularly if the establishment lost its control over the education of children. Public education happened to be this new establishment’s primary way of reducing parental influence in, to borrow a famous phrase from my youth, the battle for their hearts and minds.

Against the Public School Monopoly

People who have no obvious stake in the matter, like most of the people who have expressed dismay at my wife and my decision to homeschool our children, tend to side with the establishment against the parents. They’ve somehow absorbed the key elements of the ideology, like the concern for “socialization,” which is either a fake concern for the children’s well-being or a real concern for their being educated outside of and probably against the ideas public schools (with exceptions, of course) inculcate and impose.

Before someone remarks that some homeschooling parents are very odd or inept or (in a very few cases) dangerous: Yes, of course. It is not a perfect system. No human system is. But that doesn’t answer the question of who should educate children.

And it’s not an argument for the public school monopoly. For one thing, these failures and problems describe the public schools as well, especially if you think some of the ideological commitments that animate a great deal of the educational establishment is dangerous in themselves.

I was taught, for example, the Enlightenment mythology of the dark, anti-intellectual ages dominated by the Church and how those who rejected religion discovered science and brought the world true knowledge and freedom. Which is, simply as an historical matter, wrong. It also indoctrinates children into a particular religious commitment, though the schools claim to be religiously neutral.

The widespread presumption against homeschooling that I encountered among self-styled liberals is, to someone like me, a very strange reversal. Educating your own children is an act of the kind of freedom I was taught our country provided, a freedom of self-determination that is one of its great glories.

I was also taught by my liberal teachers that removing oneself from the system was a laudable act of counter-cultural liberation. They taught me to praise the kind of work homeschoolers do: teaching children individually, being able to choose curricula and readings and customize the teaching to every child’s needs and gifts.

As I was raised, homeshooling expresses liberalism and liberality in public affairs. It is one way of planting some of those thousand flowers.

What I learned then, I believe strongly now: that if mass production is bad in the creation of bread or cheese, it is much worse for the formation of vulnerable human beings. The work should be entrusted only to the craftsman who loves his materials and will have his name on the thing he creates.

As the twig is bent, so shall the tree grow. Raised as I was, I can’t help but think that homeschooling’s unctuous critics have betrayed the American vision of freedom with which I grew up, and rationalized the extension of social control in a way my peers and I learned to see and resist. It can only do our nation good to have parents so invested in their children’s education, and it certainly won’t hurt the cause of liberty to have the monopoly of the public schools so concretely challenged.

Down with the gardeners. Let the flowers bloom.

A version of “Homeschooling’s Liberalism” first appeared in the January 2012 issue of First Things, of which David Mills was executive editor.