Reddit mentions of Anonymous Tip

I know you're probably not serious, but in my opinion the weirdness came first. For unrelated reasons I've actually been thinking a lot about this.

If you look at the history of homeschooling in the United States, it was basically the norm until the 19th century, when compulsory education laws started springing up. Here and there, there were a couple of legal challenges to allow people to homeschool, usually in religious communities that were not considered to be anywhere close to mainstream, such as the Amish. But it wasn't even really a thought until maybe the 70's, and it didn't start to really pick up steam until the latter half of the 80's.

Just as a personal note, my dad had this cousin who was very sickly. She would have been in middle school in the 1960's, but she had to stay home for part of the school year to recover from illness. So her parents had an unquestionably valid reason to be homeschooling her, doctor's note and everything. But a teacher came by her house to, I guess, check up on her/assign homework like every week. Otherwise, it was truancy, even if she had her mom there going over the material. That was just the situation at the time (in Pennsylvania). Nowadays, she would just be homeschooled with probably much less interference from the state.

So there are a couple of reasons for all this. For one thing, you had things like Native American boarding schools driving overall compulsory education in the 19th century.

Also, and this is speculation on my part because I don't generally see it spelled out like this, but I think the government would have had much less trust in the population back then. Like, "why is my kid not going to school? Uh, because I'm homeschooling him" "Fuck off, buddy, you're not homeschooling him, you're having him work on a farm/in the factory." Nowadays in the US, we generally have the notion that the default thing for a kid to be doing all day is school. That wouldn't have necessarily been the case in the olden days, at least outside the middle/upper class. So that's why families would have to be compelled to send their kid to school.

Homeschooling, as a concept, started to gain a little bit of traction in the 1960's, with the hippie movement and the related phenomenon of those 1960's child psychologists who think children should be free, man! The argument for homeschooling back then would have been something like, "schools crush children's independence and teach them to be mindless automatons". At the risk of launching a counterjerk, Bernie Sanders was one proponent of this viewpoint.

The religious element had always been there but it wasn't really a movement, but in the 1970's it started to become more prominent in the larger homeschooling movement. This is concurrent with Christian fervor itself becoming more normalized in the US. Obviously, most of the US had been Christian before, but in the 70's you saw the rise of people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, the fact that the US even had a president who was Born-Again (although Carter was a Democrat and had something of a reputation as a bleeding-heart, he was, in a sense, both a sort of religious "trendsetter" and part of a dying breed).

Honestly, it was casual study of the rise of homeschooling in the US that made me realize that the religious right and the hippie movement aren't really that different. The religious right and the hippies would both probably agree that the problem with public school is that it indoctrinates children to be slaves to the state. Both have conspiracy theorist strains and I think both movements are rooted in what can charitably be called a romanticist viewpoint and what can uncharitably be called "feels over reals" (and I'm not being euphoric over here, I'm not saying that because they're Christian and believe in le sky fairy, but the 1970's-1980's era Great Awakening had nothing to do with reasoned theology and everything to do with raw emotion. Consider Tammy Faye Bakker and her famous crying.)

Anyway, around the mid-1980's was when the pendulum swung and the religious right was the majority in the homeschooling movement. This was concurrent with the Reagan/Bush 41-era dismantling of rules in general (see also: mental health, with which the government had definitely been excessive and heavy-handed during the 1950's and 1960's but in the 80's swung too far in the other direction--that also had its roots in a hippie sentiment of not locking people up, but in the 1980's appealed to those on the right who didn't want the government to pay for things).

The HSLDA (Homeschool Legal Defense Association, a bunch of abuse-enabling scumbags) was founded in 1983, and did a lot of work to open the door to homeschooling in general. In 1992, it was officially an option in all US states. Fun fact, Michael Farris, the founder of HSLDA, is also a novelist. Lol.

None of this is to say that only weirdos homeschool their kids. Far from it. Today, it has been normalized. So people in the US, even secular non-hippies, come to view homeschooling as an option, like just another thing people do. "Oh, yeah, you have your public schools, your Catholic schools, your homeschoolers...." And I'm not denying that it's probably best for some kids and can be handled well. (Although, spend any time reading into HSLDA and you'll see that there's a distressing number of parents who like homeschooling because a public school guidance counselor might notice if a kid is covered in bruises or worse...) But it took a while for it to be normalized.

TL;DR: in my opinion, homeschooling rose by a combination of a decrease in the prevalence of child labor in the US and the hippie movement directly paving the way for the religious right.