In the United States, opting out of public schools is not new. When Thomas Edison's public school teacher said he was "addled," Edison's mother took him out of public school and taught him at home.

Education at public school year-round from about ages 6 to 18 only became common in the 20th century due to compulsory education laws. The first law requiring attendance at public school passed in Massachusetts in 1852; the second such law passed in Washington D.C. in 1864; and most states did not pass mandatory schooling laws until between 1870 and 1917.^[10][11]

But even under compulsory education laws in the late 1800s, the school year was only twelve to twenty weeks long. Very few stayed in school from ages 6 to 18. For example, by 1900, only 6% of Americans had graduated from a formal high school. Moreover, these students did not learn basic skills like reading in school; they learned them at home.^[12]

Baltimore's Calvert School began selling the school's curriculum to parents in 1905.  Within five years, more than 300 children were enrolled in Calvert's correspondence courses. Over the next hundred years, Calvert served over 500,000 children from a wide variety of families nation-wide and around the world, including missionary families and those in remote locations. ^[13]

Homeschooling began in the 1960s from very different ideological sources. Seventh-Day Adventists Dr. Raymond and Dorothy Moore pioneered homeschooling as a result of their research into education and their concern about the harmful effects of schooling on students, particularly boys, between ages 5 and 15.^[14] On the other side of the political spectrum, John Holt wrote a book critical of schooling in 1964, entitled How Children Fail. Holt was "a left-winger who regarded schools as instruments of the bureaucratic-industrial complex."^[15] More generally, millions of Americans were alarmed at the 1962 U. S. Supreme Court ruling which banned school-sponsored prayer in public schools, and many of those parents began to look for alternatives.

Truancy laws brought pioneering homeschoolers into conflict with local officials. The first New York Timesstory on "home schooling" appeared in 1974, and concerned two parents charged with "educational neglect" by the Westchester County Department of Social Services. Tests showed that they performed at or about grade level "except for one who is a little slow in reading," and the parents received strong support from a state senator.^[16] By the mid-1980s the Times was running articles with titles like "Schooling in the Home: A Growing Alternative" and "There Are Benefits In Homeschooling," and states were legalizing homeschooling.^[17] A 1997 article said "It's not only Christian fundamentalists any more" and a 2003 article noted "Unhappy in Class, More Are Learning at Home."