According to the Home School Legal Defense Association, the numbers of home-schooled children are increasing presently at a whopping 25 percent a year. Ten years ago the movement could have been characterized as marginal—a strange mixture of mostly fundamentalist Christians and a few inveterate hippies—but a "new breed" of home-schooler is now emerging, well-educated urban and suburban professionals whose motivations may be neither religiously nor socially radical. And while a 1992 summary of several demographic studies of home schooling families shows that 75 percent are Christian and regularly attend church and 90 percent can be categorized as "white/Anglo," home-schoolers are becoming more diverse by the day, their ranks swelled by parents who are simply "fed up with the schools" and are "fuelling the search for public-school alternatives."

This trend is the product of more than a frustration with overcrowded classrooms and disappointing academic results in public schools. It reflects a deepening polarization between parents' and educators' notions of what desirable results would be and how to achieve them. Indeed, it reflects a breakdown of public consensus on the deepest questions of moral and civic life: how to raise decent and productive citizens. It is also a dramatic statement of a new kind of commitment to family life, and of a conviction that a rich family life is our greatest reward. Home schooling is one aspect of a new vision of family life that equates family time with children's well-being, and that puts family intimacy and parent-child bonds before self-realization and economic gain.

Home schooling families typically have more children than families who send their children to school. They boast a higher degree of parental involvement in the home, usually with an at-home mother functioning as teacher. While most are not poor, few are wealthy. In 1992, about a quarter had incomes of less than $25,000 a year, and only 20 percent incomes of more than $50,000 a year. The average home schooling family, the summary concluded, had a slightly lower family income "compared to the nation at large."

Steve Stecklow, author of a recent Wall Street Journal report on home schooling, asserts that many of the home schooling parents he talked to don't so much harp on the failures of school as wax poetic about the pleasures and rewards of close family interaction. These parents, he says, would be loath to send their children to any school, even one with an excellent academic reputation. "Some mothers remarked to me that they just enjoyed having their kids around the first five or six years, and for that reason wanted to keep them at home." Yet Stecklow points to a growing network of resource and support groups, and extracurricular and sports activities organized locally by home schooling families as evidence that home schooling parents are not, as some critics charge, simply retreating from society, or raising a generation of social misfits.

In my conversations with home schooling parents, I have been struck by the extent to which they defy their stereotype as overprotective control freaks. In fact, many home schooling parents see the school as confining and controlling. The home, they say, is a far healthier environment for cultivating individuality, independence, and special talents. Former teacher David Colfax and his wife, Micki, whose four home-schooled boys have gone to Harvard, point out that in institutional schooling, the child "is age graded, sorted, labeled, and resorted according to currently fashionable criteria ...processed, over the years, much like a can of soup or a piece of hardware." The public school curriculum can never compete with home schooling, he insists, because it is by the very nature of institutionalization a compromise—"a hodge-podge of materials and assumptions resulting from the historical interplay of educational theories," as well as "organizational... and political expedience." . . .