The Changing of the Guard, 1983–1998

Abstract

Until the mid-1980s homeschoolers, for all their ideological diversity, largely worked together to accomplish common political and legal aims. But in the late 1980s a new group of Sectarian leaders largely succeeded in making the movement’s key institutions more exclusively conservative and Protestant. Notable organizations in this transformation include curriculum providers like Christian Liberty Academy, Bob Jones Press, and A Beka book, conferences like those organized by Gregg Harris, magazines like Sue Welch’s The Teaching Home, and, most importantly, the Home School Legal Defense Association, which by the end of the decade had become the nation’s leading advocacy agency for homeschooling. Romantic homeschoolers influenced by Holt and more moderate religions homeschoolers influenced by the Moores were outnumbered and outorganized by this interlocking network of institutions. The Gentle Spirit controversy of the late 1990s illustrates both the power and the limits of these Sectarian institutions.