It’s 11 a.m. on a weekday, and I am grocery shopping with my two children, at the time ages 8 and 10. I give them each a shopping list to complete on their own, and they push a child-sized cart around the store and pick up the items on the list.
We regroup at the cashier and start checking out. He looks us up and down, and I can feel it’s coming: “No school today, then?”
There it is. I know it’s a harmless question, but it gets repetitive after hearing it so much.
“We homeschool,” I say. “Actually,” says my 10-year-old daughter, “we unschool.”
I die a little inside, because I know this will lead to one of two things: either a very abrupt end to this conversation (and the cashier probably filing me away in the extremist religious box) or a rather awkward explanation of what unschooling actually is.
The awkwardness doesn’t end when we’re surrounded by homeschoolers, either. My son is now 10 and my daughter is 13, and we still homeschool (or unschool, should I say? Which is really just a type of homeschooling that is self-directed and rooted in children’s autonomy).
Before we join any local group, I try to get a sense of where people stand.
Is it a religious group? That would be a no for us, as we’re secular.
Will someone invite me to a screening of “Plandemic” and refer to themselves as a “freedom fighter”? That’s very much not our jam either.
Will we find ourselves listening to parents talk about “woke ideology” in schools and how children are identifying as cats, and teachers are spreading the “gay agenda”? Yeah, no thank you, we’ll pass on your homeschool apple picking event.
“A few years ago, we took part in a homeschool postcard writing event to protest Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill,” the author writes.
Courtesy of Francesca Liberatore
My children get along with all sorts of children, so in some ways it’s more a me problem: Will these other parents (mostly women, let’s face it), become friends? Or can I stand being around them now and again, even if I know no relationships will blossom? It’s a minefield.
The homeschool community is anything but a homogenous community, it turns out.
Don’t get me wrong — we share spaces with people of all political and religious persuasions. I don’t shield my children from the world — in fact, we are committed to inhabiting it fully. For us, unschooling is about centering our children’s personhood, and living in ways that are culturally relevant and embedded in the community.
But there are times when we want to find our people, too: the homeschoolers who are lefties and progressive, who care about social and environmental justice, who are not into conspiracy theories, and who home educate because they prioritize the rights and personhood of their children, and of all children.
These homeschoolers do exist — and although we are a minority, we are a growing one.
So when I watched Donald Trump talk directly to homeschoolers in his Agenda 47 message and claim to have our backs, my question was: Which homeschoolers do you mean?
The more I’ve been immersed in the homeschool community, the more aware I have grown of how divided we are. We’re not the monolith that Trump seemed to imply in his speech, or that the media or general public seem to imagine.
He doesn’t represent me, and the homeschool community he is talking about is nothing like the one I belong to.
I don’t believe I have a “God-given right” to be the leader of my child’s education. I believe that conflating parental rights with God’s will is unspeakably dangerous for children.
Despite not aligning with many of the beliefs of many homeschooling parents, I had always wanted to home educate. I think this came from an understanding that as a parent, I felt I knew best what my child needed. Writing this down now, I recognize how problematic it can be to stand for parental rights, but the call of homeschooling can feel really refreshing to parents who perhaps want something different for their children, and who most of the time are driven by doing what they think will be best for their child. It can be absolutely life-saving for the parents of children who are struggling at school, or who are marginalized in some way, whether they are queer or neurodivergent or immigrants or families of color. So, in March 2020, we made the decision to give home education a go.
My reasons for homeschooling were many, but mostly it was about creating an environment where my children could live and learn in the ways they preferred and at their own pace, and to decenter a schooling system that felt increasingly neoliberal and capitalistic — focused more on competition and metrics than on the way children learn.
“We are on a mission to read banned books!” the author writes.
Courtesy of Francesca Liberatore
The homeschool discourse I was encountering seemed, on the surface, really harmless: Homeschool advocates claimed homeschooling was about nurturing family relationships, creating a learning environment that works for our individual children, centering education around values, and slowing down.
The more I immersed myself in the homeschool community, the more a lot of these seemingly benign principles began to appear eerily similar to extremist Christian homeschooling rhetoric. The more I read and spoke to people and joined online communities, the more I began to recognize that a lot of reasons progressives like me home educate are watered down versions of fundamentalist Christian agendas. Many people in my position don’t like to acknowledge the throughline, but it’s there.
Extremist Christian subcultures that espouse “biblical patriarchy” and also virtually mandate homeschooling, such as Quiverfull families, emphasize the rights of parents to control their children’s education. These right-wing groups are the reason many of us are even able to homeschool, which forces me sit with how uncomfortable it feels to owe my family’s autonomy in education to extremist Christian lobby groups, and how worrying it is that my way of protecting my children’s rights — and giving them a say in their education — is actually legitimized by the Christian patriarchy movement.
The focus on family and connection is perhaps a very diluted version of some Christian subculture’s promotion of the family unit, with a Head of Household (the father) who makes all the decisions, and everybody else submitting to him.
The glorification of freedom and “educational choice” looks harmless initially — what could be wrong with that? — until you realize that the freedom many homeschoolers talk about is unbounded, and devoid of any other principles of social justice. And until you recognize that educational choice means defunding public education and setting up a privatized system of “school choice” or vouchers for homeschoolers. This is a political agenda that will undoubtedly harm the poorest and most marginalized, and serve those who do not have children’s best interests at heart. Why are we not listening to children’s voices when making decisions for them?
I began to feel really wary of a lot of the things I’d previously endorsed.
I still don’t really know how to reconcile my reasons to continue to home educate with the fact that, often, home education is associated with ideas and values that I vehemently disagree with and that stand in direct opposition to my own.
What I do know is that Trump’s championing of homeschoolers erases an entire group of us who are horrified by Project 2025 and Trump’s policy agenda.
Trump is right — since 2020 there has been a consistent rise in the number of families who homeschool in the U.S. (although, unsurprisingly, his data is wrong).
Statistics on homeschoolers are historically very unreliable because many U.S. states don’t actually require a parent to report that they’re homeschooling, let alone how they’re doing it or how many children they have. This is a huge problem when trying to find reliable data.
A recent survey revealed that while homeschooling numbers peaked in 2020 during the pandemic and then briefly dropped again, they have continued to rise compared to pre-pandemic levels. Homeschooling is in fact, “the fastest growing form of education,” according to a Washington Post survey, rising by 52% in 2023 compared to 2017-18 levels. Another nation-wide survey found that around 5.4% of school-aged children are homeschooled, a rise of at least 12% since 2019.
Exact numbers are difficult to pin down, and vary regionally, but I did a quick search by my zip code (coastal Maine), and out of a community of just under 2,200 people, there were 44 homeschool students enrolled in 2022-23. This is almost double the amount in 2020-21.
“I love that we have time to learn loads of new skills,” the author writes. “Here we learned how to make rubber stamps.”
Courtesy of Francesca Liberatore
What is more interesting to me about the recent data on homeschoolers, however, is this: The reasons families choose to pursue this path are changing. In 2016, over 60% of homeschoolers polled by the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) Parent and Family Involvement in Education survey, replied that religious instruction was one of the reasons for homeschooling. In a 2023 Washington Post poll, this figure was 34%. The main reason for homeschooling appears to be concern with the school environment. This data is not 100% reliable, but it gives us a good indication of the trends.
The homeschoolers Trump is talking to — the ones who see this kind of education as their “God-given” right — are no longer the majority of us. Further statistics show that the fastest growing groups of homeschoolers are no longer white, but Latino and Black families ― in turn also helping to bust the myth that home education is only for white, privileged families. What’s more, a significant group of homeschoolers now describe themselves as liberal or progressive.
In the end, what keeps me grounded are a few things: My children are thriving. My son plays soccer in our local league, loves building and crafting, has a passion for figuring out how things work, and is an extrovert who will talk to anyone. My daughter is a deep thinker and a drama kid. She is an avid reader, an amateur baker, and is increasingly open and ready to try new things. Both my children are happy, well, and learning every day. Home education has given us time to build trust and connection, and allowed my children to follow their interests, to play, to have an unhurried childhood. I see unschooling as a path to respecting my children’s autonomy and advancing the rights of all children, and a growing number of parents view it as a way to divest from harmful systems and embrace liberatory practices.
And yet, I don’t advocate for homeschooling. I don’t see it as a viable long-term solution for an education system that desperately needs more funding, safer schools, and more focus on the rights and autonomy of children. We need places for our children to go, to play and learn and be around others of all ages, to grow and become responsible, caring people.
Trump’s pitch to homeschooling families is the opposite of that: It is a promise to do away with a system of public care that, albeit extremely flawed, is more needed than ever. It is a bizarre elevating of a niche group of people to the national stage, as a symbol of how we should be “educating” our children, and that is terrifying.
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Because what I have researched and seen of extremist Christian homeschoolers bears no resemblance to what I believe a rights-respecting, caring education looks like.
Finally, by assuming all homeschoolers want the same thing, Donald Trump is ignoring those of us who believe that children are our collective responsibility, and that they are best cared for when we put their rights and voices at the center of policy and practice.
I wish there was a way I could express all of this in the same time it takes for me to say, “Oh no, we’re not that kind of homeschooler,” but until there is, I’ll keep looking for ways to give voice to our growing ranks.
Francesca Liberatore is a mother, writer, youth advocate and researcher. She writes about challenging cultural norms around children’s autonomy and rights, consent, education and mothering at www.alifeunschooled.substack.com She is enrolled in a Masters of Education at University College London, working on carrying out research on children’s rights in education. She lives with her husband and their two home-educated children on the coast of Maine. Find Francesca on instagram @radical.mothering.
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