When my mother pulled me out of kindergarten to homeschool, it wasn’t a religious choice. We were an average Christian family, casually attending a non-denominational church. I was a shy child, overwhelmed by the boisterous atmosphere of my school and quickly targeted by bullies. Homeschooling was supposed to be a temporary measure, a chance for me to build up confidence for a return to school. For the first few years, I thrived on a flexible curriculum that built upon my natural love of reading and writing. Homeschooling gave my family ample free time to take field trips and participate in science and craft fairs. A local homeschooling group provided everyday social support as well as extracurricular activities.
But over time, the group became polarized, driving out non-Christian families and focusing more on “character building” than academics. Religious homeschoolers recruited my mother to a strict form of patriarchal Christianity, convincing her that homeschooling was a godly necessity and that the right to homeschool was under immediate threat by the government. As I grew older and academic subjects grew more difficult, it became less acceptable for my mother to seek help outside the homeschool group or consider putting me back into school. Regular evaluation and testing in Pennsylvania kept us on track during elementary and middle school, but my education fell apart when we moved to New Jersey, a state with no homeschooling laws. I spent an entire academic year with my geometry book propped open to the same page, and my only exposure to the theory of evolution was a caricature crafted by my creationist textbooks to make secular science sound absurd.
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