Once considered a social anomaly and a feature of social isolation, the practice of home schooling emerged as a more or less conventional alternative to participation in universal public education over the course of the last 20 years of the 20th century. An important reason appears to be the growing disenchantment with the quality of public education in primary and secondary schools and the security of students attending such schools: "Increasing enrollment, budget crunches and teacher shortages may have stretched public education beyond its limits" (Hirsch and Samuelson 1). In 1980, most states forbade home schooling; by 2000, all 50 states had authorized some form of it and had mechanisms for monitoring compliance with state educational standards (Lines 64).
Home schooling has been linked to social cleavages in America's culture wars, though the profile of home schoolers has changed. In the 1980s, when the concept of home schooling was rare, home schoolers were statistically likely to be identified with alternative-lifestyle demographics and socially liberal critiques of the "standardization of instruction" and culture in public schools (Stevens 18). Today, with an estimated 2% of all primary- and secondary-school-age children (Hirsch and Samuelson 4) and up to 10% of all privately schooled children being home schooled in any one year, families identified with socially conservative demographics and Christian evangelicalism are more likely to fit the home-school profile, chiefly because of what is perceived as the "secular curricula" of public education, as well as "the moral uncertainties of public-school peer groups." Parents in this demographic "often talk about home education in terms of divine will" (Stevens 18).
Critics of home schooling say that it harms public education, robbing schools of resources allocated on the basis of enrollment. Advocates say it is a way of avoiding the social problems besetting public education ...