A couple of months after two children attacked Enna Pink’s son with sticks at kindergarten, he began pleading with her to stay at home. “I didn’t want to force him to go,” says Ms Pink. She and her husband, who both worked at a startup, thought home-schooling would be a better fit for their son, who is “hyper-sensitive”. But it is illegal in Germany, where they lived. So they moved to Costa Rica, where home-schooling is illegal for locals but there is little oversight for digital nomads.

Illustration: Anna Parini
Illustration: Anna Parini

Now her children, seven and four, do not follow lesson plans; instead they learn by playing outside, joining other children in local activities and travelling around the world. She thinks all this fosters curiosity and confidence. “We feel that what our society needs in the future is not what the school system can offer,” she says.

Home-schooling has long been associated with oddball parents, awkward children and shaky pedagogy. But it is growing swiftly. Numbers were rising before the pandemic; they have since surged in countries like Britain, Australia and Canada (see chart 1). In America 3.2m children, or 6% of the school-age population, were home-schooled in 2024—more than double the number in 2019.

As home-schooling has grown, the families who take it up have changed as well. Take America, where home-schooling, once a fad on the counter-cultural left in the 1970s, was by the 1980s driven by conservatives who decried schools as “Satanic hothouses”. It is still associated with white evangelical Christians.

But nowadays home-schooling parents in America look broadly similar to the rest of the population, says Angela Watson, head of home-schooling research at Johns Hopkins University. In fact, she says, home-schooling is rising quickest among families of colour, many of whom worry about discrimination and culturally insensitive curriculums. For perhaps similar reasons, in the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey in 2022-23, a higher percentage of home-school parents identified as LGBT than did public- or private-school parents. Ms Watson notes that most families “mix” types of education: around half of home-schooled children in America are taught that way only for one to three years.

The reasons for home-schooling are changing too. Parents now are more likely to say their primary concern is their child’s physical and psychological safety. “Since [my eldest] was born, the world has gone a little bit crazy,” says Rebecca Hardman, a British mother. She and her husband planned to send their young son to school when the pandemic lockdown ended. But they began to see home-schooling as a long-term alternative. Children at school seemed more exposed to pressure from peers and the corrosive influence of social media. “All this stuff has changed so rapidly that every moment that I thought, ‘Oh, maybe it’s time’, I’d just be like, ‘God, actually, what would he be learning?’”

Parents also worry about the rat race. The UN’s World Health Organisation, in a survey of 280,000 young people across 44 countries, found that the share of 15-year-old girls who felt pressured at school had risen from 54% to 63% between 2018 and 2022. That is a particular worry for children who have learning difficulties, are autistic or suffer from poor mental health. (One in six of the 126,000 children educated at home during the autumn term in England last year cited mental health as the main cause.) Traditional education is “rigid, unwelcoming, stressful, bureaucratic and plainly unbearable”, says Hanna Lippi, a parent in Slovenia. She home-schooled her children before regulations were tightened in 2024 and is considering a move abroad, so she can continue to do so. Because of the focus on academic assessment, she says, “Families are burned out.”

Other parents simply think they can offer better teaching. Many see national curriculums as behind the times on everything from race to artificial intelligence—or as too hidebound for a fast-changing world. Issy Butson, who hosts a popular home-schooling podcast, began home-schooling in New Zealand after 20 years working in software companies and startups. He spurns traditional subjects if his children do not enjoy them. “Our eldest is a storyteller: he’s a writer and a reader and an illustrator, and he’s always been into that. So it’s absolutely crazy to think we would ever sit down and teach him maths. It would just seem completely pointless.” Instead he uses online tutorials to teach topics like coding, which he thinks are more useful. Schoolchildren have “been trained in a totally different model for a totally different world”, he says.

Rejecting schools worries many. Some studies conducted by home-schooling advocates find that home-schooled children outperform their peers. But the practice looks worse in some other studies which take family background into account.

In 2025 Cardus, a Canadian think-tank, published research which factored in childhood poverty, whether the respondent grew up with both biological parents and whether they were in a religious household. The paper, by Ms Watson and Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas, found that American adults who had been home-schooled were less likely to work full-time or have a household income above the median wage. A 2014 study, using data from America’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health, found that home-schoolers aged 12 and up were two to three times more likely to report being behind their grade level. And in 2020 a meta-analysis by Robert Kunzman and Milton Gaither found that home-schoolers tended to perform well on verbal tests but fall behind on mathematics.

Studies of mental health and social integration also paint a mixed picture. Much of the data is collected through self-reporting, and most home-schooling families are inclined to say they are well socialised. But the duration of home-schooling seems to matter a lot. The Cardus report found that pupils taught at home for eight years or more reported the highest levels of optimism and close social bonds. But those taught that way for one to two years reported the highest levels of anxiety, and those who were home-schooled for three-to-seven years had the fewest close social bonds and lowest life satisfaction (see chart 2).

One aspect that is difficult to measure is the degree to which children may be isolated and vulnerable to mistreatment at home. That is a focus of advocates for more home-schooling regulation, like the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, an American outfit where many staff were home-schooled themselves.

There is no peer-reviewed evidence linking home-schooling to higher rates of abuse or neglect. But globally teachers are the most frequent reporters of cases to child-protection services, so reduced contact between pupils and school staff may enable mistreatment to go unnoticed. Some experts worry further that children may be removed from school by abusive parents on the pretext of home-schooling. In 2024 a study by England’s Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel found that home-schooled children were “less visible” to safeguarding agencies, though it also stated that most children educated at home “have happy and safe lives”.

Many countries have extremely strict home-education regulations. School attendance is compulsory in places such as China, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey; exemptions are rare. In some other countries, including South Korea and Singapore, it is subject to tight restrictions. This year Britain passed the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, which sets up a national register of children who are not in school and provides more local oversight of home-schooling; previously parents were required simply to ensure their children receive a full-time education “suitable” to their age. And in 2021, after a spate of terror attacks, France passed a law restricting home-schooling to exceptional circumstances in a bid to combat extremism and protect secular values.

But in other countries the rules are remarkably relaxed. America, the home of home-schooling, has seen waves of deregulation, in part thanks to decades of lobbying by the Home School Legal Defence Association, a conservative group that now operates around the world.

Those who can’t, teach

In almost all American states guardians can educate at home even if they have a conviction for violent or sexual crimes against children. In 42 states there is no minimum qualification threshold for parental education. Only eight American states require all home-schooled children to take academic assessments, and 27 have no home-school testing requirements at all. Eleven states do not require families even to notify districts that they are going to home-school. And some states now subsidise the home-schooling of children, allowing parents to spend taxpayer money on services such as tutoring.

In extreme cases the lack of regulatory oversight can enable pernicious ideology to spread unchecked. In 2023 a home-schooling network in Ohio that connected as many as 3,000 white supremacists over social media was exposed; Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was a cornerstone of its curriculum. Officials investigated the group but ultimately found that no laws had been broken, as the state’s home-schooling laws do not regulate curriculum content.

Such may be the stereotypical hazards of home-schooling, but more broadly the practice is finding support across the ideological spectrum. Ms Watson notes that in a 2024 survey American home-school parents were only slightly less likely to identify as liberal or moderate than their public-school counterparts. Parents of all stripes now are given to say—notwithstanding the mixed findings on performance and social adjustment—that they simply want what is best for their children.