The home-schooling special: today's choicest choice.(from the editors)

For those who think about school choice, vouchers and charter schools are canonical. But going by the numbers, home schooling is the choicest item on the choice menu. A few thousand students use vouchers, and a million or more students attend charter schools, but home-schooled students, now estimated at some 2 million, outnumber the other two groups combined.

Home schooling is hardly foreign to the American experience. John Locke's advice to parents in colonial America was to educate their children at home. He could not imagine "what qualities are ordinarily to be got from ... a troop of playfellows [at school] ... usually assembled together from parents of all kinds." Even if the teacher's industry and skill "be ever so great, it can[not] ... be expected that he should instruct them successfully in anything but their books."

But somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, John Locke's advice was forgotten, schooling became compulsory, and home schooling had to be reinvented. The honor goes to the antibureaucratic, anticompetitive, "new Left" school of thought articulated by Ivan Illich and his articulate disciple, John Holt, who captured the imagination of the flower children of the sixties.

If the baby was born in hippieville, the toddler was soon kidnapped by Christian social conservatives. By 1990, 85 to 90 percent of all home schoolers came from the ranks of the Religious Right. Even Holt could not resist a Libertarian cry:

 
  Some may feel that the schools teach a dog-eat-dog competitiveness; 
  others that they teach a mealy-mouth Socialism. ... What is important 
  is not that all readers ... should agree on these questions, but that 
  we should ... work for ... the right of all people to take their 
  children out of schools. 

That right is to be found in the penumbra of the Constitution that guarantees the right of privacy, home schoolers say, but getting the Supreme Court to agree has not been easy. In a famous case, the Court was persuaded, on religious grounds, to exempt Amish adolescents age 14 and older from Pennsylvania's compulsory education law. It said nothing about the right to home school younger children or the rights of those who have secular reasons for preferring education at home.

Then last July a California appeals court drew on the Amish decision to interpret an ambiguous California law as giving families the right to home school their children. Oddly enough, the same court had said--only a few months ...